LOCKED IN

 It seemed like we lost the world then - the modern world. Though the "laptop class" soon migrated to the digital domain, the circumference of everyone's existence shrank overnight. People who were till then peering at Mars, were confined to the narrowest range- a mass hiding out against an ancient enemy. I had been working as an assistant professor when the lockdown was announced. It was almost the end of the academic year. What started out as a well-deserved vacation dragged on turning homes into bunkers and quashing plans like parasites.

The initial ignorance and panic regarding the scale of the threat was hard enough. But as time passed and deaths rose, other side effects began to emerge. Taking a break from teaching, I began to explore content writing. While some of my friends lost loved ones, others struggled without work. I saw the people around me lost in various capacities. The most unorthodox of them had to return to their orthodox hometowns. All over the world, the self-sufficient and the free were being transplanted back to collective cultures with the family and the state reigning supreme. The pandemic was too formidable - only a community standing together could battle it. But like all battles, it had its moments of greatness and meanness.

The public health rules churned out by a sluggish bureaucracy were arbitrary in design, unequal in implementation, and punishing in particular to the poor. Experts warned of victims locked at home with abusers, those with special needs forgotten, loss of education, and a looming mental health catastrophe. What I read in the paper stopped being a distant occurrence to me. For I heard from and about the real victims frequently. The advance of the vaccines on the other hand, and the speed and originality with which scientists of various nations developed the novel technologies were all a testament to the collective strength of ourselves.  It was the saving grace and the beginning of the end of the chaos. 

Without any possibility to step outside, I turned inward. As a result, it was a time as liberating as limiting to me. Though I came out of the experience with an intense desire to travel far and wide (exacerbated by a travel content writing stint), ideas and books opened up absorbing avenues which saved me from hopelessness. Emily Dickinson - that self- selected recluse- captured what I felt better than anyone!

"The Brain—is wider than the Sky—

For—put them side by side—

The one the other will contain

With ease—and You—beside— "