It’s a rant. Because these thoughts keep festering in my brain without an outlet. I was an ordinary college student until that fateful day in March when my university asked us to to go home for two weeks as per the government guidelines because we had a new disease in our midst, the Sars Cov-2 , aka the infamous Corona virus. I still remember that I reached home on my birthday. That weekend my father came home from the state he was working in (our family of four is split across three states in India). That weekend was also the one lockdown was imposed in our country. We weren’t scared much. We were just happy we unexpectedly got to spend a lot of time together as a family. A shit show was happening in the country and we were aware of it, but we felt we were safe in our little bubble.

This period was chaotic and scary. I could hear only talks about this virus in every conversation. I thought, how bad could it be? We were a state that had battled and won against the Nipah Virus. This just looked like a bad case of flu. Boy, was I wrong. I saw great countries struggle and fail, even with their modern equipments and technology. Slowly my country and soon, my state had cases. Still, I thought, we can do it. We are fighters.

I remember learning Mathematical progressions in school. Though in college I did not take any math related subjects (I majored in Arts), I was about to see some Progression in real life. And this, I did not like at all.

Still there was some semblance of normalcy. Our technologically challenged teachers and us learned about hosting cases online (successfully) after much trial and error. My father worked from home. It was chaos, but at least we didn’t have to face the horrors the front line workers had to. And also the statistics looked positive. The rare moment an Arts student takes comfort in Math. Numbers skyrocketed across the world. Why wasn’t a cure discovered already? That’s what happened in all the movies I’d watched. There would be a cure, there had to be. Just a little longer, I thought.

Lockdown showed me a lot of things. The inconsistencies that happen when an office suddenly asks all the employees to work from home. How difficult it was to have an online- only education. How much the daily- wage earners suffered when they couldn’t find work. Several exoduses across states. The things our governments could and couldn’t do. But selfishly I thought, every one in my family and all my friends are safe.

Another lockdown memory I never want to recount is my surgery and post surgical recovery. Though the actual surgery wasn’t major, I had to go to the hospital for nearly three months afterwards and I could see for myself what was actually happening. We couldn’t take the same route twice because there would have been a case or two and the area would be cordoned off. I had never seen so many ambulances on the streets before. There were hardly any cars on the streets. My town, that was always bustling with activity, was lifeless now.

I belong to the infamous Batch of 2020 that had to graduate online. There was no fanfare, no celebration. At midnight on a day that I cannot remember, I submitted my last exam. And I was a graduate. I did not get to say goodbye to my friends, and there was nothing that could be done now. I miss everything, and the feeling that I’ll not be able to go to class as a student, sit in a lecture- I don’t have a name for it.

We finally make some headway with medicines and vaccines. I feel like we are in the climax of a survival movie, with a happy ending. People are still dying, but the situation looks positive. It’s only a matter of time. Sooner or later, we would be out of this horror show. Politically, too, our country can hold its head high. We ring in the New Year on a positive note.

The first two months pass by without much incident. Many institutes and organizations have already started working on partial capacity. And soon before we can process what happened last March, its another March already. By the end of March we hear the first cases of people dying without oxygen. The situation goes downhill from there. And for a country that’s been suffering through this for nearly an year, we are unprepared to handle the situation. Oxygen canisters empty out faster than ever, leaving patients gasping for life force. Hospitals are out of ventilators, care units, beds. What they have excess of are patients on the verge of death and bystanders who can do nothing but watch their loved ones die. The country is out of medicines and vaccines. Entire cities are just gigantic funeral pyres. I watch all this everyday on the TV in our living room. I have never felt more helpless in my life. I try not to think what the doctors and other health workers might be feeling, and fail miserably.

I honestly could not believe how things went from looking positive to apocalyptic in such a short period of time. Who do we blame? The politicians, who scream at each other on national media? Or the doctors, who warned us time and again that this would happen, and can do nothing else but cry helplessly as they have to turn down the very people they vowed to help and save? Or our leaders, who are either still clueless about the happenings around them or are still under the belief that their influence will save them against a virus? Or ourselves, because we slacked off as soon as we saw a ray of hope in the vaccines?

I’m not putting this out here to create some drastic revolution or blame anyone and neither do I have any expectation that this will blow up. I just wanted to get this out of my head. I could always have put it up on a social media platform as a post but that would have only sparked off another debate, and I don’t have the mental capacity for one right now. My family is scared. Seeing death and helplessness everywhere doesn’t do much to alleviate it. Will we able to see this through? We could switch the news off, but how far and how long can we run from the reality? Death is rampant and will snatch people ruthlessly. It doesn’t care whether you had a family you had to provide for, or the life you led. It comes and it takes.

Still, I pray for some miracle to happen and for all this to end. Because if this continues any longer our population will only be left with shells of people they once were, lifeless and hopeless. I hope everyone comes together, putting their differences aside to fight this enemy together. Let’s stop blaming each other and pull through. Years later, if and when a movie is made on this situation and our children watch it, I want them to see survivors and fighters. They will pester us for stories, for first hand accounts. And I want us to be able to look at them and say, It was tough, but we did it.