The Game of Survival
“Everyone is going to remember this time. “We’re all going to have very sharp memories of this time.” The question is, will we be proud of how we used it?
It was in March when my college announced the last semester break. I was relieved that finally, I would go home and eat good food. While in the evening I was enjoying tea with my friends in the mess, somebody read the news that there had been two cases of Coronavirus in Rajasthan. We took it casually, discussed it for a bit, and then sprang with our conversation. Never knew what we were ignoring then will going to bring the whole world on its knees. The following day, I packed my bags and headed for the airport. Within three hours, I was back in my home city Lucknow. Like any typical college student who eternally misses home, I started savoring my vacation and waited for Holi, but as Holi came nearer, the cases began to rise steadily. A disease that everyone took so casually is now named a pandemic and is known for taking people’s lives. The sorriest part was that there was no cure; people were astounded because everything happened so abruptly that no one could do anything but see deaths. It was dreadful! The outcome of all these mishappenings was LOCKDOWN, a nationwide lockdown, and till when nobody knew. Everything was closed from school to colleges, shops to hotels, office work turned into work from home and whatnot. Day by day, death tolls were at their peak. Every day was a record-breaker; television news was full of covid information, migrant crises, and deaths. Everything never seemed this negative and hopeless. As a girl in her teens, this affected my mental health and so much that somedays I felt like shaving my head.
I waited a long to let things get back to normal, but it never seemed like things would ever get normal. Living inside four walls 24*7, sanitizing everything, face mask, face shield, online classes, etc., all this became a new routine, and it still is. I still remember washing bananas with detole liquid (an anticipated liquid) to ensure they didn’t have corona germs. It sounds funny to me now, but at that time, the fear was real. The situation was so bad that people used to stand in a long queue to get the oxygen cylinder, medicines, PPE kits, and some were even buying in black. It appeared as if the end of humanity was near. Social media was full of news like shortage of beds, ventilators, medicines, doctors, ambulances. Sometimes just to divert my mind from negativity, I used to think about all the food items that I left in my hostel cupboard, hoping that one day I’d go back and eat it with my friends. I used to count all the things that I took for granted. It’s so unfortunate that we all fail to fully recognize the value of something until it is no longer in our possession. Nevertheless, even in these challenging times, many people came forward to help each other. Some started distributing food to poor people, helped migrant workers reach their homes, and arranged beds and medicines for the needy.
As life became monotonous and tedious, to get out of it, I applied for jobs, started reading books, went back to my old hobby of drawing and painting, and introduced meditation into my life. Slowly but steadily, I started enjoying these times. I started attending my online classes, tried to be as active as possible, started doing video calls with my friends, finished internships, got a call from a media house, and did many other good things. Swiftly things began taking a positive turn, and it all happened while I was working from home. Somehow, I became productive from a lazy person. Though Netflix and chill always topped the list, reading and painting helped me survive. Where meditation and internships became my new lover, college and hostel were nothing but long-lost exes. I used to make journals and my to-do list for each day. It’s a different story that I could never complete everything in one day, but I was trying my best. Another exciting part of all this was the social media and its trends like making the Dalgona coffee, Modiji’s tasks, the hype of Money Heist, etc. Half of the world became the influencer, or we can say everybody was doing something just to keep themselves busy and divert their mind from the negativity. I read somewhere in Stoic philosophy,” when lives take unexpected turns, you suffer and struggle because it’s hard. Bad things happen, but you have to survive and managed to shine. I implemented this in my life because sometimes hope is hard to hold onto, especially in dark circumstances. In tough times, it’s the little things that give us the meaning necessary to keep going.
After one and a half years, when the government eased the lockdown restrictions, the first place I went to was a book fair. I spent almost 20k and made my tiny personal library in my room. It was the best feeling as I never was this close to books. My closeness with the books indicated that I had changed a lot; otherwise, the first place that I would visit was a fancy restaurant. It’s not that the COVID has gone, it’s very much present, and we all are now waiting to see if the third wave will hit us as severely as the previous one. There is no doubt that the two waves took everyone’s breathing, but now I look back and thank the Covid-19 and that I’ve been stuck at home. It made me reflect for the first time on what I want to do with my life? It made me learn a new set of skills that I can’t believe I went so long without. My grades took a hit. It acted as a wake-up call to weaknesses that needed to be shored up. A revelation to strengths that had been lying dormant for so long. There’s a Greek proverb, “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” Just like this, my goal during the pandemic, and for the remainder of our lives, was to plant trees for those who will come after us and make the world a little better off than the way we found it. I took every day as a challenge to use this experience as inspiration to do better things in life. What bright spots can I find? What good can I choose to zero in on? How can I transform this situation into a defining experience? All this was not about naive optimism but a reason to survive and make something better out of it, and to some extent, I was successful.
