Beyond Covid

My early morning visitor today

Half a year is a pretty long period in the autumn of one’s life. Covid has consumed as much as that at a time when I was contemplating certain substantial changes in my lifestyle. I wanted to do some travelling first of all, some long-distance drives on weekends along with Maggie. That was meant to be my way of making the imminent retirement a smooth transition from the classroom to the cosmos. Ironically, my cosmos shrank to my table with a laptop and the current book. Ironies are inescapable companions throughout life.

Blogchatter’s A2Z Challenge kept me blissfully engaged in April and the exercise ended in the creation of a book about books: Great Books for Great Thoughts. This volume is available absolutely free; just a click on the given link is all that it costs you.

Online classes have provided me the only meaningful contact with the world from May onwards. The alarming spread of the pandemic prompted me to look at the meaning of suffering and the result was a short book: Coping with Suffering. After reading that book, one of my fellow bloggers wondered whether the pandemic had brought about a religious conversion in me. The book looks at suffering from the points of view of Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism before doing the same from more literary and secular angles. For once I found myself dealing with religions with considerable benignity which made my friend wonder about my possible conversion.

June and July found me experimenting with Google docs and forms so that I could make some effective changes to my online classes. One of my former colleagues in Delhi assisted me generously by sending me a lot of information about sites that can be of immense help to online teachers. The latest such message from her landed in my phone yesterday: Open digital educational tools for interactive online teaching and learning. I have not been able to employ much of this in the actual classroom yet. Technology has its limits too.

What amuses me most is the increased interaction between my students and me when we don’t meet each other at all. Many of them call me and more of them use messaging systems to be in personal touch. A few of them have become part of the family, so to say, with Maggie too joining in the lively conversations that have little to do with classes. The profession has certain joys that have nothing much to do with the profession!

Life goes on in spite of Covid. But the alarming rate of the increase in affected cases day after day takes away much of the joy. Maybe, Covid is here to stay with us for a while and we have to learn to live with it.

PS. I collected 30 of my short stories too during this period and the anthology, Love in the Time of Corona, is available as an e-book.

Comments

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below. Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Remedios the Beauty and Innocence

Remedios the Beauty is a character in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude . Like most members of her family, she too belongs to solitude. But unlike others, she is very innocent too. Physically she is the most beautiful woman ever seen in Macondo, the place where the story of her family unfolds. Is that beauty a reflection of her innocence? Well, Marquez doesn’t suggest that explicitly. But there is an implication to that effect. Innocence does make people look charming. What else is the charm of children? Remedios’s beauty is dangerous, however. She is warned by her great grandmother, who is losing her eyesight, not to appear before men. The girl’s beauty coupled with her innocence will have disastrous effects on men. But Remedios is unaware of “her irreparable fate as a disturbing woman.” She is too innocent to know such things though she is an adult physically. Every time she appears before outsiders she causes a panic of exasperation. To make...

The Death of Truth and a lot more

Susmesh Chandroth in his kitchen “Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought,” Poet Shelley told us long ago. I was reading an interview with a prominent Malayalam writer, Susmesh Chandroth, this morning when Shelley returned to my memory. Chandroth says he left Kerala because the state had too much of affluence which is not conducive for the production of good art and literature. He chose to live in Kolkata where there is the agony of existence and hence also its ecstasies. He’s right about Kerala’s affluence. The state has eradicated poverty except in some small tribal pockets. Today almost every family in Kerala has at least one person working abroad and sending dollars home making the state’s economy far better than that of most of its counterparts. You will find palatial houses in Kerala with hardly anyone living in them. People who live in some distant foreign land get mansions constructed back home though they may never intend to come and live here. There are ...

The Covenant of Water

Book Review Title: The Covenant of Water Author: Abraham Verghese Publisher: Grove Press UK, 2023 Pages: 724 “What defines a family isn’t blood but the secrets they share.” This massive book explores the intricacies of human relationships with a plot that spans almost a century. The story begins in 1900 with 12-year-old Mariamma being wedded to a 40-year-old widower in whose family runs a curse: death by drowning. The story ends in 1977 with another Mariamma, the granddaughter of Mariamma the First who becomes Big Ammachi [grandmother]. A lot of things happen in the 700+ pages of the novel which has everything that one may expect from a popular novel: suspense, mystery, love, passion, power, vulnerability, and also some social and religious issues. The only setback, if it can be called that at all, is that too many people die in this novel. But then, when death by drowning is a curse in the family, we have to be prepared for many a burial. The Kerala of the pre-Independ...

Butterfly from Sambhal

“Weren’t you a worm till the other day?” The plant asks the butterfly. “That’s ancient history,” the butterfly answers. “Why don’t you look at the present reality which is much more beautiful?” “How can I forget that past?” The plant insists. “You ate almost all my leaves. Had not my constant gardener discovered your ravage in time and removed you from my frail limbs, I would have been dead long before you emerged from your contemplation with beautiful wings.” “I’m sorry, my dear Nandiarvattam ji. Did I have a choice? The only purpose of the existence of caterpillars is to eat leaves. Eat and eat. Until we get into the cocoon and wait for our wings to unfold. A new reality to unfold. It's a relentless hunger that creates butterflies.” “Your new reality is my painful old history. I still remember how I trembled foreseeing my death. Death by a worm!” “I wish I could heal you with my kisses.” “You’re doing that, thank you. But…” “I know. It hurts, the history thing. I’...

Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Search This Blog