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COVID Caught Up With Us – Two Survivors’ Tale
It has now been a month and a half since my first symptom. I remember the day before vividly. It was a regular working day. I had wrapped up work by 9 pm or so, dinner by 11, watched a little TV and then went to sleep by 12:00 am. Everything was fine till then. The next thing I know was waking up at around 7:00 am next morning with body ache and a throat irritation. I sprung up on bed with a déjà vu of my dengue experience last November. As my sleepy self tried to find its bearings, a number of things started running through my foggy brain.…
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Durga Pujo 2020 – In Pictures
Have you all had a chance to breathe lately? Between sanitizing hands and disinfecting food, the leaves turned yellow. The coronavirus has claimed 2020 as its own. The lucky ones have been confined to our homes since what seems like forever, watching the roaring virus wreak havoc in the lives of our less lucky counterparts. Since when did staying home and doing nothing become heroic? And where did the last seven months go? But thankfully, amidst the pandemic pandemonium and swelling COVID cases, October came in like a breath of fresh air and brought with it the autumnal festival that we, Bengalis live for – Durga pujo! The life of…
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Lessons Learned in the Time of Pandemic | Collaboration Post
The pandemic has turned the world upside down. It has been more than four months since the day I bade goodbye to my colleagues at work and haven’t left the house since except for emergencies. While I am thankful to have a home where I can live and work out of without disrupting my health, financial status, the food that is put on my table and luckily, some regulated luxuries as well, many cannot say the same. So many people are out of work, uncertain of what the next day will bring. So many people have contracted the virus and have died on the streets without medical care for lack…
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Online Family Cultural Event – The Exclusive BTS | Lockdown Sanity Booster
I married into a really large family where it feels like a party every time we get together. In all the gatherings I have attended since my wedding, there has always been at least one evening reserved for performances. Song, Dance, Recitation. Impromptu jigs. Everyone eagerly waits for this performance night. Probably a tad more than the occasion. Sometimes the occasion is extended to accommodate this night. Sometimes there is no occasion at all. Only the night. See how important it is? There is an eager scuttle on the morning of the performance night. A soft energy wave. People quietly try to select the songs that will be played, arrange…
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What Lockdown is Looking Like for Me – Keeping Sane in Quarantine: Part 4
Read Part 3 here. Introduction to Anime At the initial stage of the quarantine, Tathagata and I had been debating over whether to subscribe to Netflix. We are already subscribed to a DTH service where we have rented a set of channels – sports channels for football, the popular movie channels, some of the channels that air TV shows and a couple of travel and adventure channels. This has been working well for us since we didn’t want to be committed to any of the stuff on TV. But with the lockdown in place, the equation changed. We were discussing about watching movies of our choice and maybe, follow some…
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What Lockdown is Looking Like for Me – Keeping Sane in Quarantine: Part 3
Read Part 2 here. Working Out Since I get this asked often, I have been meaning to do an entire post about my work-out routine and why exercise is a vital part of my life. But I haven’t been able to come around to it with so many other things going on that I have been sharing with you here. I will write that post down soon. So, I won’t give out the details here. Anyway, quarantine or no quarantine, exercise is a regular part of my everyday routine. An hour a day, five days a week. I distribute this hour throughout the day. I don’t go to the gym…
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What Lockdown is Looking Like for Me – Keeping Sane in Quarantine: Part 2
Read Part 1 here. Now that I have acknowledged and put my thoughts into perspective, I can have a clear mind for my other activities. Daily Household Chores You see, routine and regularity are the two R’s that maintain balance and stability in the mind and the household. With the lockdown in place, there has been a massive tipping of that scale. Routine disappeared and regularity lay in shambles. One of the key reasons behind this is the absence of domestic help. In a family of six people, this sudden change becomes overwhelming. So we suddenly ended up in a space where household labour was threatening to pile up faster…
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What Lockdown is Looking Like for Me – Keeping Sane in Quarantine: Part 1
After an unusually exciting beginning to the year and our 2-year anniversary celebration, the world suddenly came to a standstill. While we had only begun to ease into the new year by March, so had the coronavirus, without most of us knowing. When the lockdown was put into effect in India on 26th March, the virus had already started to rip the world apart. And before we knew it, the engines screeched to a halt. Earth was closed for maintenance. We went into the quarantine hoping that it would help contain the virus and things would gradually return to normal. Little did we realize then that there is only hoping…
