Analysis of life during lockdown and predictions of post Covid-19 situation

     This blog, I am writing realizing the fact that how wrong the lifestyle of a so-called modern people was. Prior to Covid19 lockdown people were living for weekends, and rest of the times they would be busy dying. Hope the situation has improved a bit during this lockdown considering the lifestyle as the main subject of this discussion. though in a single post it will not be possible to bring light to every aspect, it will be just an overview kind of thing.

     Our Society is mainly divided into three classes; Rich, middle class and poor. These classes can further be divided into subclasses but we restrict our discussion to the main divisions. It is almost 6 months since the lockdown started, now it is in unlocking phase for the last couple of months though. 

   If we pan the camera and try to fix the focus on the lifestyle of those, during the lockdown, whom we call poor, we will see a horror movie running on this video screen of the minds. That sudden lockdown, left them to immobilize with very limited resources for survival. Migrant labour was the most affected one. After a few days since the lockdown began, they were running out of food and money. So they had no option but to walk thousands of miles towards home, as there was no transportation system deployed. That was also not an easy one and the police were monitoring the movement on the road. So most of them took the road along the railway line. They would take rest on the lines as all the passenger's trains were cancelled. But those goods trains were still running. And as a result, we saw the people being run over by the train at night time when they decided to take rest due to the fatigue of walking miles. This class of poor people were fighting for survival. They are still struggling. Farmers would have food to eat but labour and construction workers do not have that luck.most of us tried to help them by providing foods and services and money to them all over India. Some celebrities came forward to stretch their helping hand to them. During that initial period, the numbers of covid cases were increasing rapidly. It was a difficult time for poor people. 

     I would rather refrain from commenting anything about the life of those rich people in this country. They are the least affected ones.

     As I belong to the middle class, according to the definition of the economy(Though I consider myself a poor in terms of wealth and property) I have seen people of this class are also struggling to adapt to the new situation. Few of them lost jobs due to this pandemic (or might be, those companies were waiting for a valid excuse to execute their plan to sack employees). But those who do not have the fixed-job, those who are in business got hit by the hasty decision taken by the central government. few had to find survival strategies by demoting themselves, like if someone was doing some business prior to COVID lockdown, during the lockdown he would become a street vendor or hawker, ended up selling vegetable on the streets. and the cost of Corona treatment is also high for some unknown reason. So those things scared them a lot.already the graph of the economy was going down and the lockdown put the final nails of the coffin. Farmers from the middle class were the people who had a little comfortable journey considering poor or other middle-class people. They had resources to survive for months in their storages.

       In this article, I'm not going to criticize the government, rather I will emphasize on the things we have learnt so far from this terrible situation around the country and world. So human beings are now forced to stay at home and work from home. Let's focus on the bright side of this situation, otherwise, we can talk about the number of death, or the number of affected per day or we can discuss how bad our health and medical system are, how insufficient our infrastructures are! we could go on and on about the negatives. By the way, Health workers and doctors are trying their best to improve the situation, even putting their life at stake. Police also tried to do their work. for more listen to the recording(link is on the next paragraph)...

            So this lockdown is having a positive effect on the environment, now we have less pollution, less traffic, at least I can see here in Bangalore. People are left with not much option of recreation, so they started to become creative. I have seen people reading books who would previously runway from reading anything. I have seen people are painting pictures, listening to songs and writing stories, poems, prose and blogs(I would like to include myself into this group). Also, people have become health conscious. The sale of bicycle increased thrice throughout the country. People are maintaining social distancing, so it also helps to stop the spread of other diseases.they are eating healthy food. And the important thing of all is that this COVID situation has changed the mindset of people.for me I've learnt to cook food, learnt to take the bold decision(previously I also took decisions, out of the box according to society, but nowadays I was afraid to make any of them).at the starting of the lockdown we three I, my roommate and my Friend, we three were living in the same apartment. Till the month of May, we were staying together, but then Chirag left as the unlock process was started by that time(we had the sweet and sour experience during the stay), and in the next month roommate left for his hometown as we were instructed to not to go to the physical office location till the end of the year. I decided to stay here in Bangalore to experience the journey in solitude. The biggest challenge I overcome is to going to market to buy vegetable, then comes the turn to give the cooking a try. My friend from Manchester wanted us to share the lockdown experience by sending her an audio recording which she would play on the community radio station in Manchester. But it yet to happen, we(Me and my friend Chirag) recorded the audio sent to her.   Link for the recoding: Recoding of the experience

     Oh, How could I possibly forget to mention the student's struggle during this period. They had to take online classes. And word meeting friends had become virtual, literally. From class 1 to university, everywhere the students, as well as teacher, were facing difficulties to cope with the situation. Though students would be familiar with online courses but depending on those methods fully by cutting off the connection from the outer world, it must be a challenging thing to do, considering the mental state that time. Anyway, they also had to sit for competitive entrance exams by risking their health.

     As I am writing this line, I can see in google under the statistic tab for "covid19" search it is showing the number of cases is 4.75M in India. I thought it would be maxed 1.2M, How wrong was I, predicting the count. The deviation is significant, so I can reject the NULL hypothesis at 95% confidence level.

     So far I can say we should focus on finding positive from these unavoidable, stressful, uncertain phases we are going through now.

      Now if we try to predict the post-COVID times, we would find these things like wearing the mask, maintaining social distance, working from home, or focusing on health and environment will be the new normal. It will take time for the economy to recover itself. but one thing we should have realized so far that what was normal previously was not good for anyone. We have to define new rules and we have to focus more on sustainable development. If we could avail public transport we should consider it as the first option rather, having a personal car on the road. We also need to take care of our mental health, as these changes are so rapid, it may affect our mind negatively.

      I want to end this post with a positive note. Whatever the situation may be in future, the human race will find a way to survive, and I hope they will take care of the other species of the earth too.

Trying to write something which may make some sense

 

                                    

Roddur ,the sunshine and our dreams to create a better world

    Continuing from the previous article. So the question still remains open  "Why do we need  Roddur, when we already have Pratyasha". To answer that question we have to look into the contemporary education system of India. We, the five started that journey together but along the way two of them became busy with other organizations, so now mainly three of us, Pronobesh, Sourit (who became professor of prestigious Glasgow University)and I from the old team, are actively thinking about the organization along with the new members, unfortunately, I don't know everyone's name. 

Anyway, so the current education system is here to produce clerk, engineers who can not think beyond the syllabus. The exceptional students would choose to be Doctor, scientist or scholars, which is very challenging considering the current government education policies(I am not talking about this current policy, which seems to me be more like imaginary rather than realistic one and we are not going to discuss that here.let's keep it for another post).In the current education system, there is no value for sports, music or other creative arenas, which is a must needed thing to transform a teenager into a complete human being. I know how we were pushed to become a good student rather than becoming a good human. Though I was lucky enough in this matter despite having rough and dark times in my educational life. At Maternal Uncle's home, grandfather taught the necessary things that needed to survive in life. But now when we see the pupils are not having time to play outside or they are taking sports as a subject and learning it professionally rather than enjoying it. Parents are putting pressure to get them ahead of this rat race. But those students are from the privileged class. Our focus was towards the underprivileged or deprived students, those who don't get opportunities like their counterparts have.

      So we wanted a system of education which could be a model for modern education in future, realistic or not.we were thinking of providing free coaching classes to those students from a relatively poor background. And for that, we would have to have a place which we could use as a classroom. One woman from the locality near Alipurduar Railway station told us that we can use her land to build the classroom .she is poor, but she did not hesitate to donate her land for education, because she(Pushpa di) and her children did have that the opportunity to get a proper education. Anyway, we started to build our classroom with bamboo fenced wall and tin roof. Pronobesh and Nabakumar were monitoring the teaching works initially and Sijal supervised the construction work, in the later phase, Nabakumar joined another charity organization.

     so as Pronobesh has a network of people around the locality due to his social and political image, it was initially easy to get volunteers.so for few months the number of teachers was almost same as the number of students. We had difficulty to bring students to the classroom, as parents were seeing our teachers were teaching things that are out of syllabus or which are not bookish. In the later phase, Biman did set up the second branch of  Roddur at his home, which was not fully free but we would collect token money of Rs 40 to convey the importance of it to those parents. this branch is now not functional.

      other than providing lessons about math, science, history and literature we would organize drama workshop.there were Dance classes, karate classes (Shibu da, the blackbelt, was teaching the technics).For a few months, there were some Yoga classes organized. Once a Mime artist came from Kolkata to take mime class for a week. we almost reached to the mark of 40 students.

       overall we tried to provide them with the complete package to become a human being for free, actually, we wanted to see them grow so that they don't need money from charity, rather they can earn the money by themselves.

         other than providing classroom teaching, Members of Roddur organizes awareness programs. Biman and Ankit did a cycle Rally from Alipurduar to Siliguri and back to spread awareness about the rights of children. Roddur organized an excursion to nearby Rajabhatkhawa forest and museum. Blood donation camps were frequent before the Lockdown, and Biman and Pronobesh would take charge of organizing those. Roddur also used to organize programs like Rabindra Jayanti, independence day or Saraswati puja. The programs related to saving nature and environment, like planting trees, were common. Initially, My brother and cousin brother and sister were trying actively to help the organization grow. 

         But the issue with this kind of non-profit organization is that people who are not motivated enough will lose enthusiasm after a few months. Roddur also was not an exception. We lose a few members due to lack of enthusiasm. They might have imagined Roddur as something else and made themselves disappointed. But we also found new members joining it. 

        I guess volunteers also have learned something from the journey with Roddur. They have the chance to see the underprivileged classes from that close. Only those volunteer with knowledge and enough enthusiasm to learn would realize the fact, they will know how privileged they are and will continue to do good things towards society. This experience will become a treasure for them along the way

      Roddur went through difficult times, time to time, but never had that fear of having this organization going to shut down completely until the Corona came. The premises is close now, but surely it will open soon, to keep our dreams "to make the world a better place" alive.

Pratyasha To Roddur : A journey to be continued ...

   As long as I remember it all started on the day of Durga Pujo at Alipurduar.It was 2010, I and my friends were doing pandal hopping in the evening on the crowded street of that subdivision town. we were discussing things ranging from food, politics to education and things that humans beings would discuss at the age of 25-26. So when we were discussing the topic education, then suddenly we came up with an idea of organizing a talent search exam. five friends Nabakumar, Pronobesh, Manan, Sourit and me. Previously I was thinking of providing a scholarship to the needy student who is having innovative ideas. So that day Sourit brought up the idea of doing something to identify talent here at the town, I immediately  seconded that proposal along with others.so immediately we headed towards Sourit's maternal uncle's home, which was nearby one, to discuss the proposal. and that's from where the journey began of "Pratyasha".

       so for the next three years, we were organizing exam in science and arts subjects. those questions papers would be innovative, set up by the alumni of prestigious Universities of Kolkata. My school Mc William H.S. School allowed as to conduct the exam on Sunday.me and Sourit was out of town as I was studying MCA and searching for a job in Kolkata, and Sourit was Studying literature at Presidency University. Though he was in charge of setting the questions papers. I was just advertising about it on social media, and one thing I forgot to mention is that we were doing these mostly from our pocket money.I had to sacrifice the money I kept for buying Digit magazine. anyway, next year I got a job in a startup so now I could afford to buy Computer magazines too. The ground level works were done by Pronobesh, Nabakumar and Manan, from printing questions to arranging and conducting the exam flawlessly.

Facebook Link: Pratyasha

pic: Talent Search Exam going on.

On the third year, we decided to conduct free coaching classes as arranging those exams were becoming a challenging task, and we also found that those students from the privileged class were doing the well and were getting the prize money, there is nothing wrong in doing well in the exam but for us, it was carrying coals to Newcastle.

so Nabkumar and Pronobesh started taking free classes after their work, Naba is a school teacher and Pronobesh is a banker. That classes were conducted for underprivileged students at a place near the Town. 

this system continued till 2015 , after that there due to unavailability of classroom ,it was discontinued until it emerged as another Organization Named "Roddur" the sunshine on 2016.

Pronobesh took command of the new organization and recruited volunteers for those teaching posts. One Woman from the underprivileged class let us use her unused land as the classroom.

 

                                Pic : The Initial look of the Classroom

  so there were members form young generations , those enthusiastic youth community who were helping us in teaching the students time to time.

During Saraswati Puja

Roddur's moto is to help students to think out of the box, so there used to be Yoga and karate class along with Drama workshops. Our aim is to make those capable of fighting any odds in life.

                                                                            Karate 

Roddur conducted various awareness programmes to spread the light of knowledge and scientific thinking. Now Due to Covid19, there is a pause in those activities, but soon those activities will be resumed.Right now we are working on registering the organisation.

                                                                               Cycle Rally                  

                                                                tree planting program 

A lot of things yet to write down about this organization. I will write those in the next article. The focus would be on the education system we want to revolutionize through making small but continuous changes in our mindset and in society.

Roddur Facebook page