Co’V’dified – Be Strong

In the initial days of the lockdown, my wife was telling me that the days are not moving but suddenly we noticed that we are in June. That made me reflect on what I’ve done in the last 68 days. At the beginning, I had started keeping a small wired journal, jotting down what I did on a daily basis. When I looked at my journal on that first page I have written that this is a tracker for daily things for 21 days.  Now that we have completed 68 days it made me look seriously at how do I capture my experiences.

First things first, it was amply clear that I would have to operate most of my time from my room and so I decided to make the room attractive. That meant I had to come out with creative pictures. I made sure that I did not sit in one place but had at least 3 designated places to work including the balcony in the event that there are tough problems and challenges to deal in the day.

Once the Office space and time were fixed, it was time to step into the domain of self and family. I decided to follow a set of daily routines and make some changes on the way. It started with a sugar-free day to two meals a day as I felt I was not doing my morning walks in the initial phases of lockdown and also kept a target to shed some extra weight from my body.

I also reached out to a lot of my old bosses thanking them and also reached out to school and college friends.  My daily routines involved reading books. I particularly liked business storytelling books and also some books on Emotional Intelligence.

I learned how from Zoom, Skype, Webex and Microsft teams have become part of our daily screen time and every day we touch the keys to put ourselves in those frames. Our communication and listening skills were tested to a new level. I learned that the “universe could gaze upon you only in the way you frame it through the corners of your video camera.“

Apart from books, it was also about watching videos and leveraging social media and digital platforms wisely. I did not check FB and Whatsapp randomly and kept a designated time. That helped me optimize my energy and time. In these times, energy management was very important. A nice line from the movie “Pursuit of Happyness,”  Stillness defeated the storm was very poignant.

My port in this storm was my family and it all started with watching a couple of comedy videos together. As a family, we watched the Netflix episode of Amit Tandon and we all laughed like never before. In the last 68 days, I watched 14 movies. I have not seen so many movies in the last 5 years. Among them, Pursuit of Happyness and Forrest Gump stood out and I was glad that I took it out of my bucket list.

Apart from movies I also made it to the kitchen. The testimony was my wife coming up to me and asking me for a small piece of utensil that she was unable to locate with her maid and I gallantly and confidently walked in and picked it and showcased it to her. My wife has now started calling me “Domesticated Das“.

During this time my wife and I tried green tea which we both hated in the past and also did intermittent fasting just to make sure that we are burning our calories. Parenting is no child’s play as I found that closeted inside they were “locally vocal.”

As lockdown norms are easing down, we’ve now got used to new normal…

After a long time, my wife and I drove to my daughter’s school to get her books. She was very impressed with the new system. Security guards have become health warriors and the system was put in place so well that going in and coming out was a breeze. During our drive back she noticed one of the lakes with lot of birds which was not the case earlier.

We watched our younger daughter taking online classes this week from school and dance lesson during weekends. I stepped out to meet a friend and this was the first time we went to a cafe and they allowed to sit for one hour with our take out drink. The cafe had people coming in and going and everyone was wearing a mask.

Mask is the symbol of how much you care about yourself,  if you maintain distance it shows that you care for others and if you are washing your hands and sanitizing it shows that we have lost faith in surfaces. Screening became the new norm. Screens became ubiquotous. Family jostled for bandwidth and all at home whispered to Wifi.

We couldn’t have fathomed 68 days before that a Virus can change the world. As Yuval Harari , famous historian noted that today we are better placed and better positioned to address this pandemic.  He commented that the least and last threat is between country borders and we have to think about protecting the borders of our human world from the virus sphere.

Sound Mind, Sound Body and Sound vibes got CoVidified  and that made me strong.