Musings from the Pandemic

Bringing in the New Year on a cold December night, when the clock struck 12 midnight, with a warm the fuzzy feeling of a hopeful 2020 to mark the end of a decade, we were oblivious of stepping into the year that will be remembered by the world over.

- PAVITHRA ANAND

Travel plans, career moves, weddings, college admissions in universities here and abroad, some kids starting their school year and some looking forward to their graduation, stepping out of college into ‘real-life’ and ‘adulting’, otherwise known as work-life, all this and much, much more were in full throttle on a highway of dreams when sudden brakes called Covid-19 brought everything to an abrupt halt.

‘Novel Corona The virus’, ‘Covid-19’, ‘SARS-like virus’ were part of news articles and primetime news channels, phrases used in some countries to describe an illness faced by people we did not know. This soon snowballed into a pandemic, social distancing, quarantine, lockdown, and asymptomatic becoming phrases of everyday conversations. We found ourselves in a world where the word positive had a negative connotation and we had to stay away from people if we cared enough. It was no longer news from another country and the severity was a jolt when this invisible threat came closer to home, to people we knew.