Time Stands Still For No One
‘’In this blog Rakesh Saraf talks about some interesting and amusing usages in Indian English.’’
It is 6.40 pm on March 24, 2020. This is the 4th day in a row when we have been homebound. For people my age, rest is good, right? Wrong.
At my age, every day, hell, every hour is precious. Time is a commodity I can ill afford to waste. I cannot blame anyone for my situation, of course. It is all for my own good, right? So, why do I feel so resentful? I will tell you why. Staying home day after day with no clear indication of when I can get back to a normal life is like dying every day. You think I am exaggerating? Ask any active senior citizen.
I saw scenes of Japan on CNN the last 2 or 3 days, time and again. Two wonderful and beautiful video clips. One was a brief insight into the Cherry Blossom in Japan, and the other was a brief description of the 7-star train journey in Japan. Both experiences I would give my right arm for, and had things been different, would have been planning right now.
And it plays often now, tantalizing me, driving me to anger and resentment again and again. But, then at any time in the world’s history there would be an older generation, right. Think of senior citizens taking shelter during air-raids on Berlin or London during WWII. I am sure they were in much worse condition than I am. I have the internet, my cellphone and laptop, Zoom and Whatsapp. They had none of these things. But, what they had is something that I have lost. The ability to talk and communicate. Not to type, “I love you” but to say it. Not to type LOL, but to laugh out loud.
Does this make me feel any better? Strangely, no. My world has not conditioned me to communicate the way a 70 year old would in the 1940s. I have been without outside human company for 4 days now. This is like a lifetime to me. I have started to go for short walks every day now, and it is small relief for me. I am too scared to talk to anyone outside, because of the dreaded virus.
What was a topical joke to all of us in the office 4 weeks ago is a bitter reality in our lives today. A young person, who has many years to live will no doubt look back at these days with a smile on his or her face. I am not sure I will, if I survive this. I will still feel anger. I cannot ask my God “Why me?” Perhaps at no other time in the history of the planet, the whole world is actually fighting a common enemy. The casualties of this war are staggering, in the thousands, and perhaps will go into the hundreds of thousand or even millions. But the enemy is invisible.
I even heard an eminent New York based doctor of Indian origin say that this virus actually does not want to kill us. It just wants to live in us. Our antibodies are the real problem. They are up in arms against any foreign invader and want to fight it to death. Often the death of the host. How ironic is this?
Perhaps the reader of this piece will not be able to relate to my emotions. Sometimes, I surprise myself too. But then, I am human. Forgive me, my lord, for I am weak, and an emotional fool.
