Two Months of Lockdown

One of the roads in my village which I discovered during the lockdown

It has been two months now since most of us were shut in at home. When it started I thought the medical science would bring the coronavirus to its knees. After all, our science took us to the infinite interstellar spaces and also to the microscopic spaces between electrons. This science gave us so much that we grew up trusting its omnipotence. I did, at least. Well, almost.

On 23 March, when the Prime Minister put the country under a lockdown in his characteristic magisterial style, I did hope that science would invent a remedy on the 22^nd day – a day after the lockdown was to end. My Prime Minister’s aplomb elicited that hope from me.  I marked the count-down on my calendar.

When the lockdown entered the second week, my hope and trust both flagged. I stopped marking countdown on the calendar. I knew the world was going to kneel down before a microscopic virus. I chose to read and write all the time. I wrote one blog post every day for the A2Z Challenge thrown by Blogchatter. On 30^th April I completed the challenge with 26 posts on 26 different works of literature, books or authors that captured my fancy – most of them being classics. Those 26 posts on books ranging from Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man to Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek have been compiled into an ebook titled Great Book for Great Thoughts which will be launched by the Blogchatter on 25^th of this month. The book will be available for free download for a month.

April passed gleefully with the great books. I also had ample time to wander through the social media. I read the comments made on many Facebook posts and laughed a lot. The posts were serious articles written by eminent writers from various publications. The comments were made by the public. I marvelled at the inanity of the public. The capacity of the public for levity and banality left me more amazed than amused. More than once my heart hardened enough to long for the coronavirus to spread more rapidly and eliminate the worst species on the planet.

The suffering of the underprivileged classes stirred my tender feelings, however. I watched on my TV screen thousands of people walking hundreds of kilometres from their workplaces to their hometowns. I saw people die on the roads. I saw corpses being dumped in mass graves. I saw the real worth – worthlessness, rather – of human life. I wondered about the meaning of suffering. I began to write my next ebook: Coping with Suffering. [The title was given recently.] The book has gone into 9 chapters already, starting with ‘To exist is to suffer’ and ending with ‘Impotence of suffering’. The last and tenth chapter, ‘Inevitable lessons’, will be written in the coming week. The book will be launched at Amazon in the first week of June.

I can see another ebook waiting to be written in June-July. I’m going to look at English language in those months. When the monsoon will be playing its bizarre melody [which used to be romantic in earlier times] on my roof and all around, I will be playing with the elegant structures of English sentences, starting with the simplest sentence ‘I go’ and moving through apparently complex ones like ‘The tall, handsome, well-dressed and equally well-mannered boy was walking,’ Well, did you notice that the structure of both the sentences is the same: Subject + Verb? Language learning can be fun if we know the patterns of the sentences in the language. I’ll explore those patterns in June-July. [Look at this one for instance: ‘The tall, handsome, well-dressed and equally well-mannered boy, who used to accompany that pretty petite girl you were speaking about the other day, was walking alone in that fateful evening while the multicoloured car with the Swastika painted all over its body came speeding along…’]

In addition to all these are my online classes in the mornings.

So the lockdown hasn’t been bad, after all. I wish it had been half as good for the weaker groups of my countrymen.