2020 Corona Games

game - an activity that one engages in for amusement or fun

Lockdown Day 26,

Mumbai,

India

                 Day 26, but it seems months. We’re all holding up, for now. We will stay put, because of all creatures, humans are the best at adapting. Of course, we haven’t been that great to adapt to alternatives of plastic and fossil fuels for years, but who cares (no immediate threat, eh?). There will be a cure for this virus, eventually. In this battle, we will win – it is only a matter of when!

                While this cure comes along, it’s important for us to be engaged. It’s important that you find things to do so that you do not end up becoming Joaquin Phoenix’s “Joker” with your inmates. Brace yourselves, we have 2020 Corona Games! Participation in these games is not compulsory, but it will definitely make you look cooler! These games are inclusive - open for all, dumb or intelligent.

Here is a list of these games, for your convenience.

1.    Dalgona Coffee Challenge – One of the best things to come out of corona virus. We would’ve never known this form of coffee without the pandemic. The most difficult part here – the coffee milk is to be sourced from a unicorn. It is not a challenge in any other case.

2.  My spouse knows to cook challenge – Men, you never cared to upload an Instagram story when your mom cooked biryani, stop making a big deal out of the poha cooked by your wife. And women, just because your husband has learnt to boil water, stop drooling over it. Be a feminist and understand that men knowing to cook is an essential skill, it’s not an amazing talent. If he did not have this essential skill earlier, what does it say about your choices?

And for God’s sake guys, stop calling them ‘best husband/wife’ if you have been married just once in your life. You can’t be the best if you ran the race alone.

3.    Saree Challenge - “Thank you my fraand for challenging me. These are difficult times, so I will spread some positivity here. Let me upload my own picture in a saree with a copied caption.” Need a microscope to find a challenge here.

Jokes apart, shame on men, actually. We need to spread our own version of positivity. We need a boxer shorts challenge – that’s how we attend our video meetings.

4.    Facebook third party apps – They would gain ‘authorised access’ to your profile and tell you what your good and bad qualities are. Introspection is difficult anyways.  

5.   Ludo Screenshots – Tag your friends and celebrate your victory. Thanks for sharing - everyone in your friend list really cared to know about the result.

            Let’s look forward to more challenges. Who knows how long we would be in this strange situation. Take care of your mental health, and of people around you. Stay connected - keep making those video calls with your loved ones and please upload the screenshots everywhere.

Try to be positive, or not?

Yours bitterly,

Ashish M.

P.S. – Thanks to my classmate Rahul for sharing his frustration about one of these games and inspiring this post. Keep your suggestions flowing, folks!

Long Time, No See

Long time, no see – an expression used as a greeting by people who have not seen each other for a while

That’s what we would be saying when we’d meet people after all this is over. It’s been a week and most of us haven’t been out much. I think soon I’d have to wash my hands off my morning walk as well. We have been sentenced to imprisonment by nature. We’ve violated the basic laws and here we are, fighting for our existence against a matter that is not even visible to us. Isn’t it mental that of all the creatures, this virus (COVID-19) seems to be affecting only us.

This situation needs a reaction. A small portion of us are giving a reaction. We even have our Indian “Lala Companies” giving work from home, whereas earlier they rarely allowed people to go to their homes. However, there are lot of people among us who are either overreacting or underreacting. Here are some of them on the top of my mind.

Over-reactions:

1. Stocking up on toilet roll – There will be water. NRIs, do your thing and tell the West, unless you’re embarrassed by us!
2. Non-vegetarians have stopped eating chicken. Chill guys, just avoid bats.
3. Graduates from WhatsApp Academy of Corona Virus Research, one of our reputed institutions. Stop bombarding us with all those do’s, dont’s, news and videos. My dad thinks all of them are true and I have a difficult time explaining. 
4. Handwashing videos. We need videos for even the most basic things now. Wow!
5. Stock markets – This is personal. 

Under-reactions:

1. Gau mutra is the answer. Someone please tell this to the Italians.
2. People unable to keep their ‘wanderlust’ in check.
3. Colleges still insisting on 75% attendance.
4. People with Corona symptoms deciding to throw parties.
5. Folks who still bite their nails when they are nervous.
6. The girl who licked a toilet seat on an airplane and called it “the Corona Challenge*”. In case you did not know, you’ll find this online. We are going to need a special virus that goes after stupid people soon.

Elsewhere, animals are happy. The air is more breathable. Tourist spots are cleaner. There’s less congestion. Me - I haven’t used deodorant for a week. No hair cream either, just coconut oil. Almost no outside food. I had INR100 at the beginning of the week in my wallet, still got 50 left! Things are scary, but sustainable as well, now that nature has sent us back to our caves.

Hopefully, we’re out of this soon. Let’s hope that the punishment meted out on us has a corrective impact, and we learn to respect our boundaries. Let’s not become fathers of mother nature. Stay safe and see you soon!

Yours bitterly,

Ashish M.

(* - please don’t try this, only for experts)

Love, For Sale!

No, we are not going to discuss prostitution.

Love – an intense feeling of deep affection

Legend says that there was a Roman emperor who believed that married men did not make good soldiers. He banned young men from getting married during his time. A young priest named Valentius (or Valentine) went against the emperor’s orders and got young lovers secretly married. Due to him violating the emperor’s orders, Valentine was ordered to be sentenced to death. During his time in prison, he fell in love with the jailor’s daughter (don’t ask me what she was doing there!). It is said that days before his death, he wrote a letter to the jailor’s daughter and signed it off as “your Valentine”. He became a symbol of love.

From the story above, we learn that all good love stories involve two happy people with a happy ending. However, what makes a love story great and immortal is one person dying somewhere or facing the abyss of all miseries (Romeo & Juliet, the couple in “A Walk to Remember”, et al..). Secondly, Valentine would have probably got friend-zoned later. There are no stories from friends of the jailor’s daughter’s to confirm whether or not she liked Valentine. Guess we would never know.

What we really know about is how to express love. Quintessential to this expression is making the other person feel special. Back in the older times, people did not have a lot to give in terms of materialistic objects. Hence, a hand-written greeting card, a flower or a love letter would be just enough to keep the other person happy. Come on, if you had plagues, famines and small pox and dictators killing people all around the world, even you would appreciate all the little things someone did for you.

Fast forward to today. Plague is gone and we have consumerism around us. Somehow, somewhere, some of us, have confused the expression of love with buying over-priced, redundant stuff and doing things which would not make sense if one was thinking rationally. Why else would you buy a stuffed toy for a grown up because it felt ‘cute’? How else would you explain a person haggling over Rs. 5 when buying a kilogram of apple but willing to pay five times the cost to buy a rose on “Rose Day”. And those cringey greeting cards with unrealistic lines like – “You will be my only one.” How can you give a card like that to someone when you are still figuring out if you are going to reach CA final or just have had enough of it at CPT?

Here’s an alternative. Why not be realistic and have a greeting card which reads the following –

“You’re my only one (at this moment)

And things are going to be great (apparently)

But in case, and just in case, it does not work for us,

Darling, you’ll still be among my top 3.”

Let us talk about the week ahead. Hug day, Kiss day, Teddy day, Propose day, Chocolate Day, Fool’s day and then, Valentine’s day. All the things that the aforesaid days stand for can be done on any day whatsoever, throughout the year, without getting arrested. But you gotta do all this in a dedicated week. I am pretty sure that these days came into existence due to someone having a great business acumen rather than people in love. Remember those diamond jewelry advertisements? They used to say something like “diamonds are for infinity”, and the woman forgives the man for some crap that he did. A great business idea again. “I was a jerk, but hey, here’s a diamond for you.” “Thanks honey, now I know you love me.”

Buying expensive stuff for the person you love is not the only way to express your affection. There are other ways, and better ways. But if your partner expects too many gifts from you, remember, you are just a Santa Claus to them.

I hope you all have a good Valentine’s week. I also hope, that you all have a good (and not great) love story. And even in case you don’t, remember, we are facing corona virus threat and might get extinct anyways.

With lots of love.

Yours bitterly,

Ashish M.

P. S. - 
1) No, this post isn't anti love. It just says that love is bigger than all of this. The biggest gifts that you can give your loved ones are your care, protection, support, encouragement, respect and sensitivity towards them. Everything else, is secondary.

2) There are many versions of St. Valentine's story online. I just chose one of the versions. It's a legend dating back more than 1500 years and the story can never be corroborated. 

Caption That!

Caption – A line, or few lines, used to elaborate a photograph

Bio – A few self-descriptive lines used to give a first impression of you

Social media is good. It’s good to connect and sometimes, maintain that connection. It’s good since we cannot meet people because we spend too much time on social media. It’s good because some of us are human and can forget birthdays. And the best and most important thing about social media is that it is great tool for stalking! If you’ve not stalked anyone through social media, you do not belong to the place.

Social media is sometimes not about others but about giving too much importance to one-self. Hence, when you see a picture captioned as “self-love”, please do not get any other ideas. It just means that someone is just feeling obsessed about themselves and that needed a picture, which was duly taken. That picture was also required to be uploaded somewhere, because “self-love” isn’t always the most satisfying if it is kept to one self.

There are other crazy captions. There are pictures which invoke the souls of mighty people. Hence, we get pictures captioned with words from Gandhi, Dr. Kalam, Confucius, Swami Vivekanand, Martin Luther King Jr., Oscar Wilde and others. That is still alright. My heart sinks when people put a quote from Mark Twain and credit it to a Hollywood actor!

Bios are quite difficult to understand as well. I am Sagittarius*, so I will behave like a jerk on Sundays. I am a Leo*, so I will be over-sensitive and over-dramatic at whatever I do. I go about being a prince/princess, because I come from a kingdom called “Nowhere”. The most creative people announce their birthdays by declaring, “I cut cakes on …………….”. These aren’t just your regular captions and bios, these are big time exaggerations.

Here are some interesting and over exploited captions.

Finally married

Am I the only one to think that this makes it sound all so desperate, for whatever reason it may be?

Mah life, mah rulezzzz…

They have restrictions at home and won’t be served dinner if they reached post 11 PM.

Perfectly flawed

Too many flaws that I lost the count

Meeting you was my destiny and falling in love was beyond my control (Every engagement/marriage pic ever)

Couldn’t fight those hormones any longer without society's approval.

Wanderlust

I am on a solo trip, but now I feel really lonely and empty and would upload a picture of every tree that I find.

I am not saying I have never used any exaggerated captions before. I may have and might again use one in the future. I would not realize it, though. There would be someone writing a blog about it then!

Yours bitterly,

Ashish M.

(* - Written with zero knowledge/interest in astrology. Any resemblance to reality is purely co-incidental)

On Writing

I have been thinking of putting my thoughts on paper (figuratively!) for a long time. Somewhere around 2017, I made a start and did type out a few pages. However, I lost my way and did not continue. I did learn. I learnt that starting is one of the most difficult things. To continue writing for some days is easier. To sustain the continuity over a longer period is the toughest of all. Another thing I learnt is that I would perhaps never be able to write good fiction. I can imagine, but I find it difficult to create something right from the scratch.

If I had to point out a reason why I could not start writing earlier, it would be feeling comfortable. Sure, some eventful break ups could have helped! On a serious note, however, I could not write because it was easy to not to write. Go to your job, slog like there’s no tomorrow and wait for payday. On your payday, settle all your credit card bills and other bills, do some more shopping and just wait for the next payday. I always felt that I should write, but never had the urge to do it. There was inner calling, but turning a deaf ear to it was rather more convenient.

A lot of people I know want to write. However, only a few of them have been able to take even a step in that direction. It does make me wonder why. Yes, not all of us would be good if we decided to create value with our writing. However, there are a lot of not-so-good writers as well out there. They are getting published. They are doing alright. Credit to them - they wanted to write and pursued with it. They prioritised writing. What they did not have in skills, they made up in determination. I am not saying that I am great at writing, what I can definitely tell you is I had a very weak determination about writing. 

You may not be great with words like Shakespeare, Wordsworth or Nietzsche. Charles Bukowski wasn't that great with words either. He was a postman who just could not stand his job. He stuck to writing because that provided him some income since he kept losing his jobs. He did alright. He made sense - not to everyone but to his own niche audience. You don't even need an audience, it could be just for yourself. 

It could be anything - a personal diary, micro blogging on social media websites, a blogging site, just anything. If you feel strongly about expressing, go for it. However, if you do express your ideas on public forum, do not be afraid to face those divergent opinions. Divergent and sometimes, illogical. It's your voice though, and be unapologetic about it. Just eliminate some of the trivial stuff from your lives and you will have the time. Everyone has enough time. Happy writing!

Yours bitterly, 

Ashish M.