Page 50 - SANRAKSHIKA 2020 E - BOOK'

CORONA TIMES THROUGH COMIC LENSES
Gayatri Sharma
W/o Shri S.S. Sarmah, DIG NEZ HQrs, Guwahati
2020, a year which has been nothing short of a roller coaster ride from the word ‘Go’. A pandemic of this magnitude is being experienced indeed for the first time in our lives.
We began to witness a series of deaths of a large anumber of unknown people abroad and gradually in India and then loved ones due to this virus. Unfortunately, few eminent Bollywood stars coincidentally succumbed to long drawn illnesses during this year.
Politically too, it’s been unsettling for India, with tension brewing in the Indo - China border leading to the horrific and brutal assault on our soldiers.
Personally, the initial months of the pandemic were exhausting for me, coping up with a high dose of Covid news coming in every day and flooding my message boxes, the sudden distancing from loved ones and a prevailing sense of hopeless feelings and purposelessness.
My movement was restricted to the confinements of my house and I would joke with friends over the phone that I am in a luxurious prison without contact with the outside world.
Then came a phase when I began to enjoy drifting into not having to speak to anyone or even maintain my appearance. With my teenage daughter busy with her online classes and friends, and my husband posted in Assam, I would be sometimes sitting in my room and talking to myself. I often woke up in the middle of the night riven with anxiety.
It was when I became weepy and the slightest annoyance a trigger to break down that I sat up one day and became conscious that I am gradually drifting into a state of depression.
I thought of the millions of people who have lost their jobs, businesses and livelihood, the devastating economic impact on the poor and their sense of helplessness.
I thought of the young children who probably were so confused and the long term impact it might leave on their psyche. We raise them to be social, to go out and play and not make excessive use of social media and gadgets but now we tell them to stop mingling, not talk to anyone and instead engage themselves with their Laptops and phones all day either doing online classes or finding recreation through digital media. Instead of experiencing a normal childhood of running around in the open, we are trying our best to keep them holed up at home for months now, making them spectators of their carefree days sliding away.
I thought of housewives and working women who are not getting a moment's rest without maids on duty and running a whole house catering to their husband and children and sometimes the elderly.
I placed myself in their shoes and was engulfed with an immense sense of gratitude, of privileges we otherwise take for granted.
But every time I would call up friends or family, I would only get a forbidding sense of gloom.
I decided then that I can’t change the circumstances but can surely change my perspective of those circumstances.
I viewed the lockdown in a manner of detachment, set aside the gloom and allowed my creative juices to flow by penning comedy scripts
about the present crisis. I coaxed
my daughter to shoot videos of mine acting out those scripts, either solo or occasionally
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