17/06/2020
Day 85
By today I am over three days behind on publishing lockdown diary entries. The day began with a 60 km ride to the farm and back. In the evening, went for a walk on the Sevagram trail. Outdoors has become effortless here and plenty.
Coronavirus is fast fading for the media to go breathless about. We now have the India – China border dispute to speak about, stoke some public anger and go breathless about nationalism. All of these issues – sovereignty, nationalism, military state etc that we took so much care to introduce with caution and encourage extensive discussion in school are now thrown at listeners by the discussions on TV, newspapers and social media that it undoes cautious work of teachers in ways that we will only realise later when our young become as rabid in their sense of nationalism as some of the commentators and opinion piece writers. If only one could ask the immediate families of martyred soldiers of what they thought about nation states and these fights and wars for borders.
It feels a hostile world. I worry about the quick rage and anger we seem to get thrown into ever so often. I have been. I am trying consciously to move away from anger and rage to reasoned living that has no space for anger. It doesn’t work to start from a place of anger in any matter.
The personal seems to have gotten way more foregrounded in these days of less workload and enormous free time spent inside the house.
There is much to write about again. The pandemic news is turning into a side story. There is much happening around – from individual lives to global events. But to keep track of a conscious stream of thoughts is hard work. There are many activities to be done in a day. The easiest one to give up on is writing. Then follows reading. And slowly one finds that it is so easy to drift through the days without taking time to pause and reflect. With the lockdown diary I felt I could try building this habi. It seems a necessary part of living. By now, I can say this with confidence that daily writing is here to stay. The regularity of publishing here might fluctuate.
Contested Realities 