What Corona Has Done to Our Times!

By Pranab Ghosh

What corona has done to our times!

You feel like your soul is sinking in the sewer muck and you are dumped to perish in the wasteland. Your body twists and turns in agony. With your desire losing its way in the labyrinthine consumerism and your ability to satisfy your needs reaching an abysmal low, you suffer the unmanly sense of insecurity that personifies our times. To feel secured here is a malady that needs psychiatric counseling and a rectification! Such is our time.

Here relationships crumble. Friends behave like foes, acquaintances turn their faces away and march past you feeling secured in their cocooned existence and you feel like the lone one left out, and then to be in sync with your times you also start showing disregard to old values, the values that you cherished once, and turn your face away from him, from her, from all those who now may not matter to you. You forget that these were the men and women who mattered to you the most once. And you put the blame on others, in fact on the hims and hers, who did cold shoulder you to be in sync with time. Such are our times.

Here joys are transient. Those are like fleeting memories, like drops of water on the hyacinth that hardly stays. Here nights are far, far longer than the days and at times they never seem to end as they engulf you, suck you into their vile degeneracy and you struggle to free yourself from the dark deeds of men or women, who do not matter to you the least, but their misdeeds shape your life and your times. Such is our time.

It is the time of recession, job loss, pay cuts, divorces, breaking ups and then trudging along in the oft-beaten path that leads you to a nowhereland where you forget even your poetry and bare your canine teeth, like the four-legged strays fighting for food near the city litter bin and the residents of the locality writing letters to the municipal authority to free your area of the canine menace. They will come and take the dogs away and de-germ them and sterilize them so that they cannot multiply and then release them; killing them would invite the wrath of the animal activists. Even they have someone to fight for their rights, as your rights get trampled and you succumb, meekly afraid of losing even the little that you have, and then indulge in the rat race to save your bed and your bread. And seldom you meet with success as you get ousted from your job and your dwelling place and go scouting for a new contract, both of a job and a dwelling place. Such are our times.

And the authorities think you have become too independent, too arrogant in the process to submit to their desires that can only enhance the quality of national life. You differ and that you have dared to goes against you as you get stigmatized and face the wrath of your employer or your benefactor though you have served them to even their heart's content. They have a society to live in. They have their political masters to satisfy because they have to run a business. Why don't you understand? So stay meek. Stay submissive. Do not raise your voice for your rights. Then they will also take you away like the strays and sterilize you, not to stop you from regenerating, but to declare a curfew in your brain. Dare not think! Dare not ask questions! Too many questions are absolutely ruled out and even a couple, if those put them in an uneasy situation, are ruled out. What bugs you, man? Asking questions do not fill tummies. Have some sense injected in your brain. Obey, man! Obey! You poor middle class rogue, you do not have an option. The poor are lip-serviced for vote bank politics and they are liked and pampered as long as they will speak their voice, and if they do not God have mercy on them! Such is our time.

And what has come as a refreshing reminder of all those eternal concepts that man is born free or men and women are equals and men should handhold men to take civilization forward, mind you is a virus, coronavirus that has acted as a great leveler, treating the poor and the rich nations alike and taking away lives as you put off a candle. Lockdown is the only way in containing the spread of the disease and thereby death. It is as per WHO's prescription. And in death the world seems to have united again, putting behind trade disputes and ideological differences, and holding each other's hand in fighting the death dished out by the pandemic. After all, even the darkest of the clouds have a silver lining!