Corona and my state of “Inertia”

Weeks 3, 4 and 5 came and went… and week 6 too! No matter how much I might have wanted to pen down my thoughts, I just couldn’t manage to! Maybe it was a lack of time or maybe I was just too tired by the end of the week! An overdose of baking and re-baking the same cake “pathbreaking strategies in handling IT business in a post-pandemic world” into different moulds with delivery timelines of “yesterday”, day in and day out, is physically and more importantly mentally tiring!

However, while I carry the heavy load of reinventing the wheel, every single working day, some people are gifted with more time, intent and energy, and thanks to social media are managing to be way more creative and bring out all their latent talent in front of the world! Be it culinary skills or performing arts (read music, dance, theatre, painting, crafts or just about anything else), it is almost magical to discover hidden talents galore.

And I, as I check my Facebook, Insta or the numerous WhatsApp groups I am a part of, at around 2 in the night, am left feeling utterly useless and demotivated for not being able to do ANYTHING! Well, cooking has never been my forte and hence I don’t even venture on that track but sing, I can but can’t end up recording ONE song! Hell, I can’t even record my son doing something nice. Not that he is good at cooking (Oh kids are good these days, but not mine!) or performing (Naah, not his style), but I can’t even end up record him batting or exercising!

Trust me, I plan every day and fail… now, this can’t be just lack of time, it is just the good old, quintessential, Bengali “Lyad”! For those uninformed or unaware, “Lyad khawa” or “Lyad” is a very Bengali form of lethargy, that, in a typically Bengali way, we “eat” and relish!

Come to think of it, I just realized that my “Lyad” is like “Inertia”. When you can live with it, why change it?

And so, weeks pass; CORONA rages;  people continue to test positive in hordes and die in flocks – some on hospital beds, some on highways while on their long walk back home and some on railway tracks, run over by unexpected good trains; alcohol shops open to generate revenue and ends in stampedes as thousands flock to get their poison – across a pandemic torn country, where much of the same crowd complains about “essentials” becoming too expensive and police forces and medical professionals continue to fight and fail to manage a country choked by a majority of irresponsible politicians and tired, bored, ill or half-informed population failing to get the real picture and therefore the real danger!

On a brighter side, more productive people continue to remain creative and energetic (especially now that Rabindra and Nazrul Jayanti is in the air), amazing looking dishes and travel photos from the past appear on Facebook walls, Insta posts and WhatsApp groups pushing my depression meter further up.

And I, as I again check my Facebook, Insta or the numerous WhatsApp groups around the same time as before after churning out the same old baked and re-baked training courses, continue to feel useless and demotivated! So, to break my “inertia”, I end up doing the only other thing I can do – write!