Musings of a White Haired Teenager

June 17, 2021, Commentary from my favorite sofa: It has been raining a lot. The roads are getting “waterlogged.” That is an interesting term, not sure of the exact origin. It basically means that the streets get flooded because it rains harder than the water can be cleared out by the drainage system. There is a metaphor for life there. Too much comes too fast and it cannot be cleared out. Devdas said it was raining hard, and their neighborhood is in a slightly low-lying area next to the high rises of Newtown. I wonder what their water situation is. On days like this there is a guilty pleasure of sleeping in as the monsoon rain shifts between a pitter patter and the torrent. I know someone who did feel guilty because of getting up a little later than usual, as did I today. Where does this guilt come from? Is it a work ethic? Or is it cumulated anxiety of the uncertainty of the past several months and not knowing where things are going, will there be new business, will there be new work,

June 16, 2021 Commentary while waiting for food: I have been recently involved with two fund raising events. The first was for the work with the wave of infections and the need for so many things from O2 to food for the people unemployed by the lockdown. That effort was very successful. The O2Cs were obtained, the set of people started to answer phone calls through the virtual call center, and Devdas continues to provide food and medicines to the families who had lost income from the lockdown. Now, I have to reassess. Mani Square is open, and I could actually go to Spencer’s and get my groceries. Do not have to have it delivered. The number of shops open is still few and the place is running at a fraction of its full capacity. Perhaps, there are many in our cohort in Gobindapur are still unemployed. That fund raiser led to things that brought a ray of hope, some support, and a sense of accomplishment to those who were answering the calls. The second fund raiser was a little different.

June 15, 2021 Commentary from under the fan: It was a hot day. The fan breeze out in the porch felt nice as the day was closing out and the fireflies would rise up from the grass and play their strange dance in the twilight. The birds are quieting down and no one, thankfully is using a grass mower that makes the terrible racket. The tempo is slow. I can understand the meaning of the “slow news days.” As I write with a certain sense of uneasiness I realize that the only things to talk about continue to be COVID-19. Today, is the day that we reached 600,000 dead in a part of the World I also call home. Again, 600,000. Since counting began sometimes in March 2020, a little more than a year ago. This is only in one country. That leads the World in the number of deaths. How does that happen? With only housing 5% of the population of the World it leads the World in the number of deaths. This number needs to be put in perspective in our forgetful minds as we continue forward hurriedly burying

June 14, 2021, Commentary from my favorite sofa: The lockdown has been extended. In a strange way though. If one tries to fully gather the details of the extension, there might be some moments of confusion. On the one hand some places are open. How do you control the occupancy level at Mani Square to 30%? Of what? What is the denominator? Is it the official number of people allowed there? There must be a finite number written down somewhere. So will it 30% of that number at any moment in time? Clock in and clock out, so at any time the percentage stays at 30. I wonder. How do 25% of office employees get to the office if public transportation is still locked down. Wil South City Mall be open for longer hours than the local mudir dokaan (grocery store). There must be good answers to these. I have tried to figure it out, but I am still a little confused. Private vehicles need an e-pass to drive around, then how will I get to the mall? Will there be an e-pass? The entire COVID-19 experienc

 June 13, 2021 Commentary again from the porch: The days go on, slowly like the summer weekends are supposed to be. Things look amazingly like 2019. The memories are getting rewired. We have eluded dystopia; it seems for now. Went out to a restaurant for dinner last night. It took a long time to get the food. And that was OK. Just the sound and the people around, all unmasked, seemed to make the wait bearable. Were we willing to wait at home when the closest thing to the restaurant was a slightly cleaner dining table, all the clutter moved out and space made for a dinner that was not cooked at home, but delivered from the restaurant that is five minutes by car but had become out of bounds. Thus we would prepare the table for the same food that we would be served in the restaurant, a little warmer, perhaps, and the French fries had not become a little soggy or the double-egg chicken roll had not wilted a little. How long were we willing for that dinner? Cooped up at home and eating virt

 June 12, 2021, Commentary from downtown: We are at another inflection point as we are flirting between real life and the virtual. Covid is probably coming to an end. And so, we must want to believe. So today at Zoom we are thinking about how enjoyable our Zoom has been for the past year. Do we still need it? Or are we in a space now where the virtual can be set aside and the real will take over. Like it used to be. Do we want to go back to where it used to be? Maybe not everyone. May be not me. There are corporations that are starting to think about how to learn from Covid and utilize this information to come back to a reality which is split between the real and the virtual. Someone called it the hybrid way of working. There is this sense of uncertainty. Went downtown for dinner. The restaurants are open, but our order took nearly 40 minutes. Would not be acceptable in the old days. A year ago. But everything in pardonable now, it is all because of the plague. One of my doctor bondhu

  June 11, 2021, Commentary from in front of Zoom: A strange thing happened today. It was preceded by an event on Wednesday, and I wrote about it. On Wednesday I resurrected the afternoon cocktail on the porch. People came. We saw each other. Unmasked. As if we were back in 2019. The June of 2019, when there were celebrations on the porch before going away to the mountain desert. Leh. And this Wednesday, two year later, seemed to erase the lost year in our collective lives. We shared a drink, we laughed. Laughed. When this was cruelly snatched from us in 2020, I invited people to the screen. How could there be a summer without the gatherings. The wine. The pretzels. Before the verandah. The time on the verandah seemed impossible without the time on the porch. In 2020 there was no verandah. Locked down and locked out. So, I invited all to meet in the virtual porch. And people came. On some days. the screen was full of the tiny rectangles. We spoke in excited voices, we picked up our pri