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The virus called “TIME”
This is a Fiction story on Corona Virus and the lockdown scenario.
” The virus called time” short story by Ramta Jogi –
The police patroled in the city saying, “Stay in to stay alive, as the virus could potentially kill you.
Against this announcement, he ran away. He ran, despite the pleas, the requests, and the instructions. Just a few moments ago his flatmates heard him thrashing his TV set on the ground before they could get up to see what had happened, he banged the door and briskly walked out of their apartment. A couple of his flatmates ran behind him, others, concerned and shocked, reluctantly dialed 100 for help. Without a care in the world, the techie ran to the streets to end his frustration caused by the forced isolation. It was 20th May, the 58th day of the nationwide lockdown.
It was in January that year, that people started to talk about the spread of a certain virus, not deadly, but highly contagious. The word was that it spreads faster than the word itself. The media conducted several inconclusive debates about the medium of the spread. Some suggested it was airborne, some said it spreads through touch.
Before the governments realized, people infected with the disease started queueing up at the hospitals. Soon, there were reports of young children and elderly people dying as their immune systems gave up the fight. Unaware of how to deal with the situation, nationwide lockdowns were instated as a measure of containment as desperate times call for desperate measures. It was declared a Pandemic.
Unaware of how grave the situation is, families and work professionals looked at the situation as the thing that was missing in their lives. The family time it was! Delicious meals, time with the kids, online movies, etc. The initial lockdown, which was meant for 3 weeks, came as a “Refresh” button for some. People viewed it as the time to recuperate from their hectic work life. Soon, the forced change to the lifestyle became a little harder to come to terms with. People realized that the love they have for their families is because they don’t stay with them 24*7.
As the days progressed, time moved slowly as many lost tracks of which day it was. TV wasn’t that interesting, online games weren’t challenging enough. Nagging from the kids caused irritation and cooking wasn’t fun anymore. Even making love, became more of a duty rather than passion. News channels and the internet spread more negativity than ever before. Caged inside their rooms away from home, students and bachelors found it hard to survive. What’s the point in punishing everyone because of the stupidity of a few?
Tension mounted on families as the breadwinners panicking about their jobs. Small businessmen were finding it difficult to maintain liquidity sighting negligible demand. Manufacturing set-ups had been shut for weeks. The concept of work-from-home was giving employees more stress than ever before as there was an apparent lack of trust from the employers.
The count of infected people kept growing exponentially, and so did the negativity in the lives of all. People woke up every morning with a hope that this will end soon, and they would be free again, but accepted the reality that it wouldn’t end soon enough.
On the penultimate day of the ongoing lockdown, it was decided that the restrictions would remain imposed for another 30 days. While everyone was subconsciously prepared for this extension, the announcement which followed sent shockwaves. The government wasn’t just grappling to contain the virus spread, they were also struggling to contain the spread of “Fake news” and misinformation. As a precautionary measure, it was decided that a nationwide internet ban would come into effect for the next couple of weeks.
This move was a huge setback for the businesses and citizens in general. It was hard to come to terms with the situation as frustration knew no bounds. News channels became the only source of information, but with the constant fear-mongering, a strong undercurrent of fear could no longer be ignored. The service of all-time and any-time connectivity which social media provided was being missed thoroughly. Especially those who lived away from their families began hallucinating. With nothing to do and no one to talk to, they felt imprisoned.
It had been three weeks since the announcement of the extension. There was an eerie calmness in the environment. Roads were empty, no airplanes in the sky. Bodies and minds were numb. The silence was uncomfortably deafening. This was a test of patience, the reaction to every discussion was an outburst.
Thoughts of going back to the streets were flooding the minds. People weren’t afraid of the virus anymore, after all, how long can an invisible enemy keep you down? The policemen guarding the streets were well-aware of the growing angst. They were thrashing people who took to the streets without any strong reason. The situation is moving towards curfew.
Long unkempt hair, a sense of fatigue and discomfort prevail. Stocks have crashed, economies are staring at an inevitable recession. People aren’t sure of how to get their lives back on track once things normalize. Most have become living corpses.
And on that day, he hurried out, to end his frustrations, to come out of the isolation. No one knew him. Just another bloke out of the 1.3 billion. A police van tried to stop him, but he was in a strange state of mind, probably unaware of what he was doing.
He fell, got up, started running again. The van chased him down and one of the policemen blew a stick to his legs, followed by another one to his head, knocking him down. People heard the screams and came out to their balconies to see what was wrong. By the time his flatmates ran down, he had been seriously injured. Seeing his state, one of them shouted: “Kill us all, before the isolation, kills us!”
The power of raw emotions and anger had found a way out. The policemen could sense the situation getting out of hand as the voices grew stronger and louder. They started hitting those near them to vacate the street. Within minutes, a huge crowd had gathered as people watching the proceedings from their balconies came down in solidarity. More security personnel were summoned to bring the situation under control. It became an ugly scene as mob walked closer to the police sloganeering “Kill us all, before the isolation, kill us!”
The frustration had finally got the better of the patience. The inner numbness had finally ended. The chaos became too much to handle. Ambulances rushed to the area to help those who had been injured. The sheer inner angst was shielding the pain of broken bones and bruised bodies as people shouted at the top of their voices “Kill us all before the isolation kills us!”
Soon a force was called, to disperse the crowd. But who knew that it was just the beginning. The isolation had a far scarier impact on the minds than the virus had on the bodies.
They said, “Stay in to stay alive, as the virus could potentially kill you.”
They were right. The virus did affect many, it was the virus called TIME.
The same evening it was announced that the Prime Minister will be addressing the country the next morning.
For more such content, visit Ramta Jogi
Corona virus – Lockdown – Story
Edited by Akshay Toplay
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The myth of a virgin Indian| Life blog
The myth of a virgin Indian | Life blog
We belong to an era where everything happens today, and tomorrow it turns out that nothing had happened yesterday. An era where rules, regulations, laws, ethics exist only in the daylight, in the frame which is seen by others. What happens in the dark, in isolation, is a falsifiable truth, a myth, which can be ignored or refuted. We are how we are seen, not how we actually are. The “real me” is of least relevance to us. The truth does not affect us, as long as it is not known to others around us. We move on and move out from our past or the darkness way too fast.
Having embedded ourselves tightly into the visibility of life, we have diminished the “thinking” component of our existence. We have accepted a life which is seen by others rather than the one which is lived by us. We have made our minds so strong that we can even differentiate between those two parts. And to make things worse we can even justify how both are right and that too at the same point of time. Any wrong action or decision is accepted and then framed to explain how they were right for us with respect to society. We convince ourselves and make ourselves believe that we are good and innocent and we have done no wrong. Hence, in the bright light of day, in the eyes of society, we become what we are seen as —
The Virgin Indian.
The rapes that are covered by the media become a shame for the nation, but the ones that take place in isolation, in remote corners, go unnoticed, unregistered and hence are said to have not happened.
The domestic violence that takes place inside the houses stays there. No one takes any notice of it. There may be marks, but there is no proof. The acts of forced sex in marriage take place once the lights go off, and once the lights are switched on, it is seen as a happy marriage again.
The acts of corruption are always termed as taking place “under the table” and so above the table, everything is clean and clear. A thief when caught justifies himself, stating “I have not done anything and I am innocent.”
These examples are among many that show that anything which is either not seen by the public or not accepted becomes something that has not even taken place. There is violence, harshness under the cover of night but in the daylight, distant from the past, it’s as if nothing happened. We are seen as pure, pious Virgin Indians.
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We have distanced ourselves from the regret of our own actions and so we have adapted to the blame game theory created by mankind. Here for each and every act which is unfair, is a heinous crime, the blame always shifts to the other person. It’s always someone else who is responsible for a misdeed or crime. We, on the other hand, are clean of any stain. In the circle of blame, life continues and in the end, no one is the source of any wrongdoing; therefore, everyone ends doing nothing.
We see being in a denial as a part of our lives and thus we see ourselves as virgins and have closed our eyes to the truth, to our own actions and our own guilt. Somehow, we have convinced ourselves that we are in a deep sleep, unknowing and unaware of what we are doing and the consequences that our actions can lead to. What we forget is that even as we sleep, we are awake in our dreams.
We need to ask ourselves, should the brightness or darkness change us from being what we are? Are we virgins in the true sense or have we just got up and put on our clothes and are thinking that nothing happened last night? But clothes are what appear to outsiders; we still feel our own nakedness.
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The problem with us is that we have blindfolded ourselves to our thoughts. The question is never what right or what wrong did we do. The question is acceptance. However right or wrong we prove to society or the outer world, we can never lie to ourselves, even in the darkness of the night and brightness of the lights. In front of the mirror, and more so, within our own heart we know that we have lost our virginity a long ago.
We have lost it along with our conscience, in terms of doing certain things as part of the fun, accepting something wrong just because it never mattered too much to us, being a part of something immoral which benefited us and many more such reasons. Deep inside we know how many times we have laid down our ethics, morals, and truth in general and how many times we have believed in our own disbelief.
We are no longer virgins; what we are now is just an answer to our own regrets. To soothe, to pacify and to keep ourselves free of the pain and torture of penitence we keep on reminding ourselves that we are virgins, unsullied. But in the shelter of dark, the actions did take place. Closing our eyes will neither change the truth, nor the consequence.
In the end, we remain the scattered particles of our own guilt, our own conscience. There we are, gathering up the pieces, trying to put them together and hoping that in the broad daylight we can portray ourselves as being the Virgin Indian.
Previously Published in The Huffington Post @ https://www.huffingtonpost.in/aakash-joshi/the-virgin-indian_b_8441370.html
The myth of a virgin Indian | Life blog
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Blog-The generation missing the closure-ramtajogi.co.in
The generation missing the closure
The path always beautifies the journey but it’s the destination that justifies it. We are a generation in a hurry!! This rush, knowingly or unknowingly, is making us a Fad generation. Whether it is a trend, technology, objects, or even emotions, everything withers away in no time.
We use things, boast about them, enjoy them and suddenly when a better option pops out, we replace them. The ones that are lost get stored in the spam folder of our brain, which is rarely opened again in the future.
We don’t like the repetition of things that has lost the touch or feel and more importantly that has been replaced by something. Also, we don’t regret them.
We have been habituated to going with the flow and letting go of things abruptly when they become redundant.
We belong to the era of logging out rather than deactivating things.
Like in an application where we delete the app from our cell phone, rather than deactivating it from the source. We do this even when we very well understand that we don’t really need it and nor will we be requiring it in future. A similar scenario goes on with objects, people and emotions as well.
At times, when relations don’t work out when emotional understanding fails to match and compatibility withers away, we tend to stop there and run away. Instead of suffocating in it we eventually move on. We declare it as our past.
We block it from our lives and start ignoring it from time to time; stop talking about it, discuss it and move into the new vibes and new people in the same old world.
Eventually, we start making ourselves comfortable with them and believe that the past no longer belongs to us. Somewhere, we create an artificial bubble around us, just to show the surroundings and convince ourselves that we are in a different zone altogether.
But whom are we fooling?
Still, somehow our profile pictures keep on changing in relation to our old memories; our passwords still have dates of our first anniversaries. Stalking the profiles of the ones who no longer belong to us, just to be updated with what is going on with them and many such things keep us subconsciously with them. When another moment of love comes with someone else, we doubt, and we tend to behave a bit awkwardly.
We feel a bit weird, and a comparison to the past erupts. This is because, inside us, we know that something is incomplete. In the presence of society, online and offline we act as if we have agreed to the past and have made an understanding with it. But deep down we know that the closure is still left. We have not agreed with ourselves that the past is gone. We have not witnessed it in our present and accepted it.
Instead,
We just ran away from it and have kept things in us still moving and hoping that the future is unknown to us and so it is better to leave the confused past unchanged in the present so that we can twist the future accordingly as and when needed.
We have kept things open to avoid the pain and still are trying to move on. This way, we have just avoided Closure.
What we undermine is the very acceptance of the thought that we are not what we are as long as our present is entangled with the fluctuations of the past. Our past has ceased. It has ended. It cannot fluctuate or move at random in our present. This is unsatisfying. Justifying a present that has the shades of the past still lingering on it in an abrupt manner is not a justified present. Good or bad whatever that past was is not even something to ponder upon.
It makes us look weak and is an unhealthy condition.
It makes us numb and guilty at times. We cannot cross the river to create new memories on the other side by staying on the same side of the bridge. The closure is what this generation fails to understand.
By failing to understand this, we end up having depression, trust issues, irrational behaviour and dubious states of mind where we cannot even accept the present wholeheartedly and nor can even let go of the past in a positive manner. The conscious or subconscious clinging to the past will not justify or define our moving on.
Whatever status you post or philosophies you preach are meaningless until you accept the past and close it. We need to look back to that past; that person, that feeling or that emotion, with whom things will not be the same now and accept it. We have to face the one that is gone. Adapt to the existing and accept the one that is left behind.
We need to accept it as a concrete part of our present. Running away from it by ignoring it is fear and not a solution to it. Life demands a closure; a closure from whatever happened. Moving on without accepting is never closure. We need to embrace the past with understanding and satisfaction. The future will look beautiful only when it has a past that it still remembers with acceptance.
Published in The Good Men Project: https://goodmenproject.com/guy-talk/the-generation-missing-the-closure-cmtt/
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The Generation missing closure
