Musings of a White Haired Teenager

June 24, 2021, Commentary from the West: Moving through time zones poses an interesting challenge. I am not sure when I am writing. Usually, I write at night – wherever I am. And it is night now. A night after watching another part of the World handle the current crisis. Things are normalized here. There is a certain flirtation with masks. Some use, some don’t. The logic is unclear. It becomes confusing when you are in a new place. I have been in just two places since the pandemic started. Which is one more place than many people I know. And now I am in a third place. I have been here before during the pandemic, once in June 2020, when the city was shut down. Storefronts were boarded up, not only because of the pandemic but also because of the riots. It was a dead city. Then in November of 2020 it looked a little different. There was some more preparation, a little more sense of control. Today it was back to the twenty-seven minutes for a ten-mile drive. The brown haze clouded the moun

June 23, 2021 Commentary from a mile high: Travel. It is back. The airports are swelling with people. The security lines are taking time. The restaurants are full. There is no space for bags on the plane. Simultaneously there is a frantic call to vaccinate and find ways to get the vaccine out. I spent some time with a person who runs a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), and we developed the plans of a vaccine drive starting with Gobindapur. Vaccines are available. For a price, and there needs to be coordination to make sure they can be given out. There is a real price for this – nothing is free. There are many who may not be able to afford it and there the NGO and people like me, supported by bondhus in places such as Wake Forest U, will jump in and start to fill the gap. As I sit here, I wonder what the World looks like from the top of the Control Tower at an airport. They are perched so high, above us, they can see all. Is there anyone who can see all of the crisis that is ending.

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 3 rd wave.” So, I would be labelled as th

June 21, 2021, Commentary from the lawn: It is that magical time. The warm humidity draws the fireflies out of the ground. Like natural drones they flicker and light up the night. The lawn becomes luminescent as the aroma of corn roasting on the fire circulates in the air-conditioned interior. Elsewhere, my bondhus are stirring out of bed, and even elsewhere someone I care for is getting ready for the evening as it sets down on the metropolis and the city lights up next to the ocean. My life is spread over places. Loved ones everywhere. Some are roasting corn, some are stirring out of bed, and some are getting ready for a busy evening. The flirtation. The anticipation. Being here, there, and also there. Phone calls and WhatsApp messages, a hard cider with some, or a “Good Morning” from another, a video call with one, and watching Fawlty Towers with another. Today I was in Calcutta, Winston, Los Angeles, and Bhubaneshwar. Place has disappeared from life. I wait for the messages from one

 June 20, 2021, Commentary from my familiar hole: Today was a good day. The numbers seem to be going down in many different places and regulations are being loosened to the relief of many. But that is about Covid. Because I started writing in the backdrop sever conditions around Covid in Calcutta in April and May of 2021, my focus has been on Covid. Today was different. The World celebrated the “father” today. The posts on digital networks were replete with tributes to numerous fathers across the World, some in the World and some not. Telephone calls, like the one from my son, reverberated in the World. In the homes of some classes of people across the World there might have been special lunches and dinners. The restaurants forgot Covid, forgot that there are real threats, and the customers arrived in droves to celebrate the father. The Biriyani order took about an hour to be ready for pick up as I watched the first seating get over and the restaurant getting ready for the next wave of

June 19, 2021 Commentary from it is about to rain here: Wars are messy things. Especially when they are over. Is it proper to celebrate victory when so many have fallen? Is it proper to mock and hurt the enemy whose very existence is met with the righteous punishment by the victorious? Actually, mostly people count bodies, tally up the numbers. Check their accuracy and then file them away for posterity. Making it numbers is sufficient to distance us from the war. Counting and classifying the dead, bring closure to the annoying “Missing in Action” category. Now, allegedly there are 75,000 missing in action in just one state. The news is headlined as “Bihar Saw Nearly 75,000 Unaccounted Deaths Amid 2nd COVID-19 Wave, Data Shows.” How is the unaccounted shown by data? Isn’t “unaccounted data” an oxymoron? Perhaps as all oxymorons it inadvertently reveals a paradox. We see the paradox of trying to bring order to the fog of war through crystal clear numbers. A quest for clarity becomes more

June 18, 2021, Commentary with a movie on TV: Today is a new day of introspection. This is the first time that June 19 th is being remembered. Officially. In fact, going forward it will be a national holiday. How we treat this day in the future will be a testament of who we are as people. It was a day that was unofficial so far. Now it has been made official. It is important to make things official. Maybe that makes it real and people would pay attention. We need more attention at times. This is true for many things. The more things seem to get out of whack, as it has for the several months, making things official sometimes offers a sense of stability. An official recognition, an official remembrance all seems to stabilize histories. The need for stability is essential for us. Be it the commemoration of a seminal moment in history or the declaration that we are getting over whatever is the current crisis. Because there is always a crisis. This is another reality that has become pandem