To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Tuesday, March 17, 2020
 
Have you watched Black Mirror on Netflix? It’s one of those “dark” genres, every episode is standalone, and each one leaves you with a sense of the surreal, as of some alternate reality where things are topsy turvy, upside down, illogical, irrational, unexplainable, absurd in a mindbogglingly scary way though… and you have no control over what’s going on or what is coming at you. I feel like I am trapped in an episode of Black Mirror these days.

Had the same events that we are now witnessing, the stories coming out of Italy, people dying with no one to attend their funerals, nurses crying about how they have to choose who will live and who will die, everyday counts of how many died and how many more infected with the virus, the social distancing measures we have taken upon ourselves even when the government is yet to enforce anything, the fear of going on public transport, the almost comic importance of washing our hands, the panic buying of loo roll, the overnight movement of all universities including mine to the online mode, the strangeness of talking to someone on the other side of the world and feeling like everywhere it’s the same, entire countries, that too developed ones, going on lockdown or border closures, working out of home as if nothing’s wrong with the world… I could go on and on but what hits me is that had this been one of the episodes of Black Mirror I might have found it to be one of the darkest, scariest and perhaps the most unbelievable….I would have laughed if someone had said this is what is actually going to happen not in the future but next month.

I would never have believed that we as a world having come so far from where we started would be brought to our knees overnight. That we would be reduced to prayer…in Hindi there is a saying oft repeated in Bollywood movies, almost a cliché, that when someone is seriously ill the doctor usually tells the loved ones that, “isse dawa ki nahin dua ki zaroorat hai”, which means “this person is not in need of medicine now, he needs prayer”. I feel like our world as we know it is tethering on the brink of a precipice (many seem to think this is a short-term inconvenience but I don’t share their optimism) and it needs a miracle…unfortunately I feel this even more because when I look around I see no leader, no one to look up to, no one who gives me confidence that things will be alright, we’re going to sort it out… I need to look way up. That is where I put my faith now because like the saying goes… we need prayer, we have no medicines for this calamity…

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 6:44 am 0 comments
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