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Roundabout: Just do it while you can!
The hovering clouds of Covid-19, the quiet of the lockdown and the uncertainty of the morrow have pushed the artists to create, writers to write and the humorists to spin joke after joke lest laughter vanish in these changed times. Thus grows the lore
When school starts, students are likely to get the following assignments, it is being said. English language teacher: Write an essay on coronavirus. Math: If Covid is equal to 1 then find the 9. Moral Instructions: How many of you participated in beating the pans and lighting the lamps? Art teacher: Draw coronavirus. The list is endless and funny even though no one knows when schools reopen.
Never mind, till schools reopen for real or ‘virtually’ given how technology dominates our lives, parents are doing all these exercises and more to hold onto laughter if nothing else in the most uncertain of times where everyone is held hostage indoors by this ugly little virus doing the scary act.
If fact, it has not stopped even when our homegrown temptress Rakhi Sawant, in a horror show get-up has warned the virus that she’s more explosive than it is, abusing it in no uncertain terms, crying out ‘go corona go’, heaving heavily all the while.
In fact, hyperactivity has become a universal phenomenon in this ‘viral’ age, with artists fervently painting messages, writers literally in a hurry to tell the sad tale of their times as uniquely perceived by them and poets giving the message of hope against hope if not for these times at least for the times to come when the person at the helm of affairs of the superpower will not call for sanitisers to be injected into patients. If the virus can be eliminated by sanitising hands then why not make it run through the veins and then sing “Que sera sera, whatever will be will be?”
Art of staying at home
Loss of life and complete uncertainty about who will get infected next have taken their toll on the human mind, but practically it is the lockdown that is the greatest challenge because most of us had forgotten the art of staying at home.
Long hours at work and some for socialising left little time for home and even children were kept busy going from school to extra-curricular activity to tuitions to playground and then home to supper and bed. Breaking this routine for over a month was a challenge and people did it and in this context US-based poet Kitty O’Meara’s poem that went viral ‘And the people stayed at home’, first wrongly attributed to an Irish poet in the nineteenth century, touched the very nerve of the housebound. The poem speaks of people spending their time at home meditating, exercising, writing, painting and dancing as a way of healing, which in turn heals the world.
Closer home, the hugely popular poet, none other than Gulzar, from whom people expect words of wisdom about things that bother them, has just come out with a poem for the times we are living in. It calls out to everyone to exercise restraint. The message is: Don’t swarm about like ants/Stand apart, away from each other/And let the sunshine in!
Of course, the joke here in Punjab is that they have never heard of this ‘Social Distance Singh’ or for that matter ‘Kaurantine’! Young sculptor Gurjit Singh, who uses cloth as his medium and the technique of soft toys, has come out with several descriptions of the personification of coronavirus. However, what is most soothing is the heartwarming sculpture of an old man and woman sitting amidst nature surrounded by gentle love.
What does the virus say?
In the middle of all of this, what does Covid-19 have to say in its defence? Fiction writer Kamla Dutt sends a letter home from Atlanta, Gerogia, titled ‘Corona tells its tale.’ And thus we listen to the other side of the story in first person in defense of nature: “I am Coronavirus, a very small creature, probably living quietly in bats in caves. You snatched my caves, my jungles, my waterfalls. You think you will keep destroying me and I will silent, voiceless. No I will not…”
