Monday. December 6, 2021.
Stating dates out loud keeps me from living in a time warp.
I was advised to read more cheerful news. I tried. I failed. I tried again. I failed again. I settled down for a cup of tea, and blush to confess that I was absolutely stirred by the stories on Fox News, HuffPo, the Sun, and the supplement of our leading national daily. Please note that I focused on hard news. I now opine that I need something stronger than tea to set my addled brains back in place.
The next few sentences are going to add no value to either of our lives but I am going ahead. Did you know? Among movies such as Stuart Little, the Theory of Everything, Gladiator, mmmm, My Fair Lady, Puss in Boots, etc., they are taking Titanic off Netflix this month. “I’ll never let go, Jack. I promise.” Sobs into a table-cloth sized towel. HuffPo reports, “Twitter Suspends Anti-Extremist Accounts After They're Flagged By ... Extremists: Report.” A Fox News headline reads, “Prince William was wary about Prince Harry slamming the press about Meghan Markle for this reason: book.” Someone, dissect that for me? My intellectual machinery failed to understand or remember a single headline from my cursory glance of the home page of the Sun.
Closer to home, “Janhvi Kapoor Blooms Like A Garden Full Of Roses In A Floral Printed Raw Mango Saree.” Life is not a bed of roses, so what must I do? Katrina Kaif and Vicky Kaushal’s “super secret” wedding has 120 guests and those not vaccinated must get a reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction test (The report just said RT-PCR, I needed to check whether I had grey matter left). “Over 50% of adult popn in India now fully vaxxed.” K. I am delighted that the number of vaccinations are on the rise, but when I wake up to read words like popn and vaxxed on a front page, I start questioning my knowledge of the only language I can articulate my thoughts in.
I felt like I travelled through one of those avoidable Rick and Morty universes when I was reading all that. Now I’m back to dimension C-137. Speaking of vaccinations and the ubiquitous coronavirus, Karnataka has laid down a bunch of rules to stop un-vaccinated people entering/visiting apartment complexes, courtesy the unwelcome Omicron alarm. If the people living in those houses are themselves unvaccinated, where do they go? They can't even gallivant about the streets here. There are none. Maybe hobble about pothole to pothole. Or is it crater to crater? The average Bangalore road has the gift of making you feel like you’ve been through a cement mixer, a boat ride, and a really jerky and unsolicited amusement park ride, evoking the best of moods and sweetest of thoughts among those who partake of this bone-rattling experience.
India started covid vaccinations in January, and turns out Maharashtra’s acting chief secretary only took his first dose yesterday! Personal choice, it seems. Also, the present Omicron scare is apparently having little to no impact on political campaigns for the Legislative Council elections in Karnataka. Boo to masks, physical distancing, sanitising, capacity restrictions, and the basics. Bigger boo to the rest of the daily tweaked 101 notifications and guidelines from the health department, which require an army of people, namely translator, interpreter, language specialist, who am I missing?, news analyst, journalist, social media influencer, general aunty and uncle on apartment WhatsApp group, and yeah, basically anyone who pretends to understand the guidelines (I’m out of touch, are they still sending out thesis-like rules with potential Greek and Chinese interpretations? If not, oh well, the travel guidelines make up for it).
Brussels is in uproar about covid norms. Rotterdam. Vienna. Zagreb. Rome. Europe, what on earth is happening? I am not qualified to comment on the measures taken to mitigate the effects of the pandemic anywhere, but I wonder whether violence will help either the implementers or the protesters get what they want. I also wonder why vaccinations have become a question of personal choice and not a public interest mandate.
While there are people asserting their personal right to get jabbed or not to get jabbed, and worrying about which shade of lilac to wear to the next tea party, the planet carries on, reminding us that we are all but specks of dust in this vast universe. This time, it’s a volcano whose name we can pronounce (remember Eyjafjallajökull?). Mt. Sumeru in Indonesia is wreaking havoc, rescue operations are hampered due to rains and multiple eruptions. We hope that the families around are rescued and head to safer territories.
Elsewhere in the world, the Solomon Islands erupted in unrest. Their prime minister, Sogavare survived a no confidence vote, amidst riots, a 36-hour curfew in their capital Honiara, an estimated loss of apparently $28 million to the economy, food shortages, unemployment, and general covid-induced crises, all happening to a population of 7,00,000 odd people. In the meanwhile, I am going to drag you guys across the Pacific, Indian ocean, and across the Sahara to west Africa. The "dance of democracy" in Gambia. They recently had their first presidential elections in 27 years, and the opposition cried foul (clearly, that’s what the opposition does everywhere about everything. Are our suspended MPs still sitting on a dharna, by the way?). Anyway, here is some trivia. Gambia is one of the smallest countries in Africa with a rough population of 2.4 billion, and its capital is Banjul. Their ex-president, one of those stereotypical despots, was forced into exile to the Equatorial Guinea (I’m sure if you’re a disgraced African despot, you’d end up there voluntarily).
I haven’t exactly been able to wax eloquent about the big bad world today. Blame it on Monday blues?
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