I am returning to my blog site after a long time. My last post was seven months earlier when it was early days of lockdown in the US and other countries. It has been a status quo; the situation continued at pretty much the same pace except that now we see hope of welcoming the new year with a smile and a sense of victory over corona with the discovery of vaccines. This being the last day of the year 2020, it is only fitting that I write a closing post of this year.
This year is marked as a Covid 19 year. There is perhaps none in the world who would call it anything other than that. In the fight against corona the world was united like no other time. Covid 19 touched and impacted almost everyone’s life in every different way. We all will have our own stories to tell in the coming years as to how and in what all ways this year changed our lives.
This year forced us to look at life with a fresh perspective. It allowed us to self-reflect, rediscover, and reinvent ourselves, to appreciate small pleasures of life, cherish the time spent with friends and kin. There was a silver lining to many as they learnt new ways of living and working. Working from home people learnt to accommodate their time and space with their family members. Many even recorded how their habits of shopping changed for the better or worse or how they learnt to cut down their festival expenses.
For many people around the world, it was a year of loss, loss of jobs and earning, loss of lives of near and dear ones. As much the way simple pleasures of life became precious, meaning of death too changed. In the pandemic deaths being recorded every day, their loss for near and dear ones was just another number added to the overall count. There were also cases of unclaimed bodies lying in the hospitals’ corners. Those dying dignified non-corona deaths could also not get a proper send off with rituals and ceremonies owing to social distancing and other restrictions.
Covid 19 changed things for me too in some very unexpected ways. I can mark 2020 as the year I discovered my talent in new genres of writing. Most importantly I finished the fiction novel, a medical thriller that I had been writing since many years. But what made it more special was I finished writing on the same desk I had begun it years ago in my home in Singapore. This is how Covid 19 change the course of our journey back home to India.
Three years after relocating to India from Singapore we found ourselves back in the city and our residence which was our home for twenty long years. The year demonstrated to us what it means to be citizens or permanent residents of a country, especially so when the world is hit by a pandemic. It showed what it is like to have a choice of having a home, with all the features of safety and security, in a country which is not necessarily of your birth. It made us rediscover and reinforce the fact that a passport or a PR stamp mean much more than just papers in situations like this. Well, the whole matter deserves a separate post.
For now, Bye 2020 and Welcome the New Year 2021