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.
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