We feel hopeless, yet hopeful for a future!

Life in a Pandemic: From the Diary of a millennial

It is 11:15 a.m., I pick up the phone to call one of my friends, it has been 10 hours since we last spoke.

“So what are you upto?”, I ask

“The same, I got up a while back.” she answers groggily.

“Did you see the news?”, she asks me.

I reply, “I just can’t look at the headlines any more.”

These are the outline of most conversations I have had with some of my friends the past year. It is like a template and our lives are set around it. The privilege of being stuck at home comes with the price of no social interactions added with a feeling of despair. The idea that an invisible virus can disrupt lives like it has is straight out of our worst nightmare. And the nightmare is not about to end soon.

The Ides of March 2020 is now a distant dream. Prior to March 2020, when India first went into a lockdown, stories of the bubonic plague and the Ebola virus were part of history book chapters and news article headlines. They were urban legends, too good to be true. Yet today a pandemic is the reality of our world not just claiming spaces in human bodies but also their breath.

The rest of us who have either managed to steer clear of the virus or recovered from it keep asking: is this the last of it? Have we escaped the wrath or do we always have to watch our backs lest an invisible force turn our world upside down again?

The word “vaccine” is somewhat of an ambrosia that millennials like myself do not know when we will receive. For the young people in India, less than half of us have even received the first dose. We still wait for the word on the availability of the vaccine and being able to get back to a sense of normalcy that was our lives before. This entire experience has shaped us into a very different bunch of people.

Last week, my 16-year old cousin had to perform last rites for his grandfather as his father fought for his life in a dingy government hospital. One of my young neighbour, a boy of all but 23 breathed his last a month ago. The list of losses we have each had to incur is too high. For all the kids who lost both their parents, for the parent who lost their child and for the families who have lost their all, there is no going back.

Death is one of the most unnerving experiences!

As a generation, the amount of death we have experienced in this short time has been horrifying. We are still not talking about the mental, physical and financial burden of this situation that we will have to carry forward.

I and those of my age and younger have recently taken up responsibilities of building a life for our own selves in this world. The COVID-19 pandemic has not only affected our futures for better or for worse but also put upon us the burden to be our own saviours.

I keep wondering if there is any hope for us. Will we be kinder, more empathetic or go back to the ways of the old world once all of this goes away?

There is no silver lining here. Our lives are stuck in a loop.

We feel hopeless, yet hopeful for a future!