15/06/2020
Day 83
This town’s rainy season is one specific memory – ripe, deep pink almonds falling all through a rainy night from an Indian Almond tree which are gathered with enthusiasm and dried. These are cracked open later, for the nut. The nut isn’t much to speak of. But the enormous effort and drive with which it was done every season, with grandparents’ help. I woke up this morning and saw that it drizzled for most of the night. Grandparents are not around anymore. The days spent with them have left a strong imprint. There is hardly a place in and around here which does not remind of them – from the rivers to railway to the farms. Association with places as this, I realize, can be reassuring and stand in place as strength when one feels unmoored. One needs these to be a little more than all the troubles and negative experiences, so that one can get through life. It is as much in looking back as in looking ahead that our lives happen. For most part, people’s miseries seem to originate in the past. It casts itself on to the present. When not being able to live the present, the future turns bleak too.
Today’s news is also about a bollywood actor ending his life. Sushant Singh was 34. He hung himself in his room. Conditions around his demise are not known. As reported, he was depressed and was finding it difficult to cope with life and career. While speculations continue, I am thinking of the loss and the conditions which makes a person give up. It did stop me a bit to reflect on times that spirits are at the lowest. How does one revive and what is that grain of hope that one grabs on and begins again.
Meanwhile, India has had 9,195 deaths due to Covid-19 as of today. The infections have picked up at a rapid pace. At the same time, we find the world already weary of the pandemic and news related to it. In the fourth month of the disease, we are seeing a tired world resuming normal life even though they know that the virus is now among us. It was statistics that gave a sense of the pandemic, it was again statistics that pacified a scared and anxious world. And it is again statistics that is making them come to terms with it and get going with their lives. Not much has changed in the nature of threat or the way infection is spreading. In numbers the world has learnt to seek comfort.
Contested Realities 