Friday, 27 March 2020

The Unreal Times of COVID-19


Our generation hardly believed in valentine. Let alone, Quarantine. This generation has grown up using landline phones restricted mostly to STD calls. Musically, was changing the sides of the audio cassettes from A to B and vice versa. Spotify corresponded to All India Radio where one had to request for a song to be played on air by practically writing letters. Foreign was as foreign as it gets. In the absence of travel bloggers/vloggers, we got the glimpse of the other side of the world via Bollywood movies, mostly featuring Govinda.

We scaled up, all that, and came so far. Information is no longer restricted to public libraries. Any city in the world can now be explored by accessing few Apps. Travel is cheap. Internet is cheap. Imported goods are affordable too. World has finally become the melting pot. The pot that has endured way too much with the advent of insensitive materialism. The voices inside have been hushed by the noise of social media. Was it too late, that we missed the red flags.

COVID-19 was already knocking at our doors before we could even totally comprehend its origin and existence. It already spread like a wild fire and continued to engulf the whole world with its fatality. This shit IS real. It is so real that it felt absolutely unreal. Within a stretch of few days, the malls shut, schools shut, corporate offices shut, eateries shut. This was copy all over the world. With no vaccine in store, numbers of infected people and death rates kept shooting up like an uncontained morbid Tsunami.

The times had changed. Countries have imposed lock down with only essential supplies available for survival, and of course the TV and the internet. News flashing the empty streets which are no longer familiar with the world we earlier lived in. The deafening chaos and humdrum has now been catapulted into a jittery silence.

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