In the one year since we went into lockdown and forced distancing, that collapsed the interval between morning and night in an endless spiral of light and darkness, Zara our daughter, has graduated to high school without giving her board examination.
She’s on an extended and never-ending summer vacation now, that actually started in early spring, taking digital tours of deep-sea diving.
Zara’s ‘course mate’ Shamshad has been lucky.
Till the other day, both Zara and Shamshad went to school (he to nearby Diksha an NGO, and she to far off Shriram without the ‘jai’ prefix, but with a lot of ‘joy’, nevertheless).
And then the Virus arrived just in time, as both stepped up from Nine to Ten.
That’s when, one morning, I heard a mellifluous angelic voice rising to the sky in a crescendo that reminded me of the strains from a much-adored Broadway musical:
‘Aam lelo, kela lelo, papita lelo.
Gajar hai, gobhi hai, tamatar hai, tinda hai!’
You can call that: Wicked!
A year later, Shamshad has grown into a strapping young man, his jawline and six packs framed to near perfection from long stretches on the road. Without doubt, he’s the best in business down our lane. His once childish intonation of the background school choir, now more commanding than Pavarotti’s tenor.
And so he lures the ladies of my hood to dig into his greens and yellows and reds, as if the traffic signal suffered a sudden virus-induced breakdown, halting both commuters and consumers on their tracks.
And I stare from the first of my seven heavens ... reminded of our morning prayer:
‘Lead us not unto temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen!’
Zara’s not been so lucky.
She’s spent this past year in contemplation, her music lessons stringed online, just as it’s been with the rest of her school.
And so she wrote a recent blog:
‘We did not think the pandemic was going to last an entire year. And I was getting restless sitting the whole day at home. I wanted to go to school, meet my friends and give them the tightest hug, have samosas from the canteen and eat rajma-chawal for lunch in the dining hall. When the lockdown was (briefly) lifted, I met my friends, though we did not hug each other. I still haven’t met some of my dearest friends. It’s been over a year.’
And so, without meeting and hugging, without the canteen din and the morning assembly prayer, Aditya, my nephew, just scrolled through his online high school passing out ceremony the other day, without flinging his cap high to the clouds, wondering if he will meet his best buddies again, as he gears up to enrol at the soldiering academy, heeding to his family’s call of duty across generations; and so it has been for their next higher-up cousin Adreeja, as she readies for her ‘call of duty’ as frontline warrior in waiting, in her final year as medic, without hands-on lab dissections for well over a year now. But should you think that’s the best of times in the worst of days when life gives you a lemon, here’s more calamity coming calling.
My high school buddy and don at the varsity in ‘Newfoundland,’ Coatchek Bog has left the spirit bottle to stir his soul to script a never-say-die soul-song for GenV, even as tenderfoots in his biochem lab burn the midnight bunsen burner to stir a magic potion to vanquish the vainglorious virus for all times to come.
Yet, Bog’s bogged down by fears (and no pun intended) of what’s coming home to roost. A second wave of migration’s in the offing, he warns, in the wake of this second wave of global pandemic.
And it’s arriving sooner than later.
And the long-winding journey back home this time will not be of the unskilled worker who took home the virus to his village in return for nothing. It will be the expat students crowding foreign campuses worldwide, taking home distress caused by unfinished courses and unplugged careers.
And Coatchek says it’s not because some rich dad can no longer foot the bill for his poor kid’s campus sojourn.
It’s something far more sinister.
Scholars born and raised in the West usually fund their lifetime’s education with expensive loans from their local banks that they pay back through the rest of their life. And that’s okay.
But for the expat student on foreign soil, the loan she raises back home from her local bank to pay for her studies abroad, is never quite enough to foot all her bills.
Which is why, they take to campus placements... as waiters and janitors and gym workhorse and lab ass, and part-time teachers.
And all those vacancies are drying up now.
For now, those scholars are making do on doles from the welfare state in much of the West where many a campus is located.
But, a free lunch can’t go on for ever. It’s time before a Trudeau or a dude just-in, turns off the tap at the campus soup kitchens.
Everyone’s waiting for the Indian strain of the UK strain of the South African strain of the Brazilian strain of the Unseen and Unheard Virus, that first made a grand disappearance from the Wuhan campus lab in China, to abate. And once the airways and flight paths are cleared between ‘our’ rest of the world and ‘their’ rest of the world, the migratory flock will be shooed away... back home. To where they belong.
You are waiting for an unexploded cloudburst, warns Bog, as he tick marks my to-do list for others to take note of before the rabble rousers take to town once more.
So what will be the choices for the boys and girls once they return, their backpacks empty?
That ‘what,’ I gather, comes devoid of too many ‘ifs’ and ‘buts.’
It’s already bleak future for those who stayed at home. It’s never going to get any brighter for those who fly back in.
Which is why Samshad got plain lucky.
Already an army of unemployed is besting the Chinese onslaught on their home soil, the best way they can, what with rising unemployment, soaring defaults on EMIs and unpaid tuitions bills for their ward? Many are relocating their children to government-aided schools from exclusive marbled enclaves of garbled academic excellence, their air-conditioning plants long switched off in this age of desperation for oxygenation machines.
A sis-in-law who taught at one of the city’s most prized extravaganzas where property magnates and real estate moguls send their toddlers to pick up a smattering of American English and a scattering of Korean cuisine, laments that the school bells are already tolling For Whom The Bell Tolls. With high rise valuations hitting dirt low and empty condos commandeered as isolation ghettoes, otherwise outstanding pupils are being blocked from online lessons and denied tests whenever their parents ‘fail’ to pay up their ‘outstanding’ dues.
Teachers, meanwhile, are taking home half-a-day’s wages for a full-day’s lessons. Worse, the non-essential essential staff made irrelevant to online semesters, as with that handsome PT teacher, that lissome yoga instructor, that macho volleyball coach and that maverick music master have been shown the exit door long ago. Worse still, the essential non-essential staff as with the librarian, the lab assistant, the housekeeper and the bus driver too have all been booted out without exception.
So what’s in store for Zara and Aditya and Adreeja, I wonder.
‘Into what heaven of freedom, my Father, will my country awake?’
In this age of digital dystopia that the doyen of artificial intelligence Subhash Kak insists has made brick and mortar campuses a thing of our Jurassic past... what’s there to look forward to beyond the screen.
Here’s my clue for Zara, Aditya and Adreeja and their several buddies they haven’t hugged in a while: Tomorrow’s script will be scripted by those who successfully navigate the time-space construct through unending rows of dot-dot-dash.dash-dot-dot.
Go, get ready for The Future! Buddy!
The rest, like Samshad, will always find enlightenment pushing offline carts or online trolleys...
Raising their rich baritone to the sky...
In prayer:
‘Give us this day our daily bread!’
Amen!
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