On Day One of the lockdown , I woke up early and rushed to my terrace to view the world around me. The first thing I see is two vegetable carts down the empty road, their owners hidden behind big handkerchiefs. A minute later a familiar young woman appears. Then a couple of teenage boys saunter by. As a DTC cluster bus roars into the bus stop in a cloud of dust and these people clamber in, I think how do you stop a billion-plus people from leaving their homes? How do you convince them that there is a rapidly growing menace that will soon engulf us, if we don’t comply?
As soon as the lockdown was announced, people rushed out and crowded their neighbourhood groceries — social distance be damned. The hoarding instinct, the crowding mentality and the complete disregard of the message of physical distancing was frightening. It would have been amusing, in a cynical sort of way, if it wasn’t for the fact that that we are more connected to each other than ever before in deadly viral networks. This behaviour is personal, and it endangered each one of us, our elderly parents and children.
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Is it some middle class anxiety of a post-Partition generation grown up on tales of material loss and scarcity? Or is it something more recent, more selfish and insular, a creeping disconnection from the real world and real people that has permeated our society in the past decade or so?
Whatever the cause and whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, this is an unprecedented, unknown and overwhelming crises in which apathy, elitism and callousness will harm each individual, family, city, state, nation and the whole world. Could we in our wildest dreams imagine it would be so hard to stay at home. Human interaction will never be the same again.
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