June 22, 2021, Commentary after the restaurant

June 22, 2021, Commentary after the restaurant: A bondhu told me today that the posts in April and May had the grittiness of war time reporting. Death. Anxiety. Horror. Make for good copy, it does. But now we are in the lull. Now we can sit at a restaurant and sip a glass of wine. Maskless. Fearless. Foolhardy. Today, Bangalore opened up. Most restrictions lifted. By the time I am home everything is expected to be open. Galouti kebab at Aafra. A stolen afternoon of gin and lime at Mani Square. Perhaps a jaunt to the club. The Lull. The news is alive with the predictions of the next wave. I look around, and I realize that some of the people have no idea what is about to hit them. 2 weeks. After July 4. Delta. This time the hit will be brutal. Red states and blue states. You can hear the rumblings on media. Are we making a mistake? One bondhu put it up on Facebook. A picture of people in a restaurant and it was captioned: “the foundations of the 3rd wave.” So, I would be labelled as the person who calls “Fire” in a movie theater. But I have seen the fire. I know it will happen again. Our collective delusion of a return to the old days may remain a cruel delusion. To be sure, I do not want it to happen. But I am not in control. We all are in control. And we decided that we are OK. We decided, not the enemy. When the deaths return, no one will remember this day when the streets were busy. Birthing is always painful. To deny the pain is to get to still birth. We have to accept the pain and birth a new way of doing things. This is a stale refrain from me. But tomorrow when I board that plane, and fly off to the West, I will have to be the keeper of my destiny. Ivermectin? Mask? Distance? I wonder if you find my fixation on Covid to be unwarranted. But I have witnessed the pain. I have sat next to a bondhu who could hardly move. The debilitation was so unnerving that there are no words to describe it. Then there are others who suffered little. Yet others who continue to suffer. And there will be more who will suffer again. I wish I am wrong, but things have changed forever, as they do after these points of inflexion in life. And just because the TV does not talk about it does not mean it is all over. I wish it were, but 45% and under 10% should not engender the confidence that I see around me. It is “Another Cold Night” in the barren land of Srijoy’s ballad.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Are you an honorable person?

End of Memories

The Prison