A Brave New World

Millions of office-goers around the world today do almost the same thing as each other every morning. They wake up, get ready and go to work. They don’t actually ‘go’ to work, but they do work, albeit from home, virtually, digitally, online.

And then there are those who do actually go to their respective offices. They too have adopted an almost identical regimen of sanitise, wear a mask, gloves, sanitise, take your temperature, maintain distance and sanitise, sanitise, sanitise.

Innumerable students globally are attending virtual classrooms, doing their lessons online.

Friends spend the evenings video chatting, playing group quizzes and other games online, over the internet.

At home, families are pulling out and dusting their old Monopoly boards, Ludo games, chess sets, packs of cards and sitting down after dinner for a good game... something they haven't been doing for years.

Families are actually having breakfast, lunch and dinner together.

The scary, devastating pandemic COVID-19 has got us talking. It has got us thinking, no, rethinking, about life, our lives and our lifestyles.

"I have been calling up old friends, aunts I haven't spoken to in years, sending messages to colleagues who I merely nod at in office," says a young office worker who is now at home due to the informal lockdown in Dhaka.

"We are generation WFH," jokes a financial analyst who is ‘working-from-home’ like most of his friends. "It's tough... not just the work, but being restricted to the house. I would go crazy if it weren't for social media. That's how I keep in touch with my family who is in Khulna and with my friends."

The key phrase nowadays is ‘social distancing.’ People are being encouraged to stay away from addas, gatherings, hugging, shaking hands, slap-on-the-back camaraderie, holding hands and seemingly innocuous social norms. But has that stopped people from socialising? Hardly!

Friends around the world have opened up video chat groups. During office work, the teams are more active and interactive than ever. People, relations, friends and acquaintances from all around the world have been calling each other, inquiring about each other’s well-being, offering words of encouragement and strength. People are putting aside their differences to make amends.

This crisis has made us realise that there are more important things in life than envying that ‘bhabi’ for her latest ‘kanjpuram’ sari or her Gucci bag. Owning the latest model in the Mercedes series is not the ultimate answer to the universe’s mysteries. To see and be seen in the upper crust social gatherings is not the oxygen of life.

The oxygen of life is the oxygen we breathe. COVID-19 has taken the cars off the streets, closed down industries and today, from topping the list of the world’s most polluted cities where air quality is concerned, Dhaka has dropped to No. 14.

It’s not good that we can’t take out our cars. It’s not good that the factories are closed and so many people are without a source of income. No one can even appreciate for a second the silence of the normally noisy city. No one can even be happy at the haze of pollution in the air being cleared. With people hungry, sick and scared, who wants the ‘healthy’ and ‘peaceful’ surroundings? It is devastating and we are filled with foreboding about the days ahead.

But in this forced ‘respite’, we are also being forced to think about ourselves, our families, our communities, our nations. Surely we can gain something good out of this time of unfathomable crisis?

So, back to the term ‘social distancing’. Surely this is not social distancing! This is physical distancing. We can’t hang out together physically. We can’t embrace, physically. We can’t congregate and pray together, physically. We can’t hold our ailing friends, physically. We can’t preach politics on the bench of the local tea stall. We can’t throng the pavements, be part of the crowd that keeps the economy rolling. But we can socialise, albeit not physically. We can pray together, while being apart. We can pray for each other, remaining away from each other.

We can invent games for our children who are bored at home, cooped up and as clueless and confused as we are about what’s going on in the world. We can help them pick up the habit of reading which many of us have lost. Most of us have seen the movie Devdas, but how many of us have read Saratchandra’s novel and actually enjoyed the nuances of his narration? Has your child even heard of ‘Thakurmar Jhuli’? Have you ever told your child the ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ story? Now is the chance to join the nerd herd. It’s not all that bad!

And there are so many movies to watch. Classics in Bangla, English, Hindi. Iranian movies. Italian movies. French movies. For those with Netflix, enjoy! You can even start a virtual book club or movie club among your friends. The TV channels are reeling with reruns, mostly better programmes than the crass commercial content being forced down our throats.

Many are honing their cooking skills, creating gourmet meals which they never had time to do before.

Being stuck at home, people are being more conscious of their physical well being too. Working out as much as they can, eating healthy, taking a little extra care.

Of course this is no holiday or fun. It is a scary time, a time where precaution is the key. The uncertainty of it all, the tragedies that we hear of every day, break our hearts, fill us with anxiety, even panic.

This is not the time to panic. This is time for calm, for doing whatever little we can to reach out and help those in distress. Reach out and help those so much more unfortunate than us.

It is heartwarming when we see students distributing hand-wash and sanitisers to the poor. It fills us with hope when we see volunteers feeding the poor and the homeless. It fills us with hope when we see big industries making personal protective equipment for free. We are proud to see cleaners, nurses, physicians, ward boys, health workers, marching ahead, doing their duty at the risk of their lives. This is the silver lining to the dark cloud around us. Humanity is still alive.

Social distancing? No, physically we may be apart, but socially, spiritually, we are drawing closer than ever before.

The pandemic has given globalisation a new meaning. We will get through this together and emerge as a purged, better global community. So though we can’t join hands, let’s join hearts, and rise up again like the proverbial phoenix. We are entering a Brave New World.

* Ayesha Kabir is a journalist.