Covid-19 is more permanent now than marital vows, but perhaps a shade darker. Just like post-prandial public belching, it is time we learnt to make it a part of our existence.
But it shouldn’t be tough living with a virus on our arm; we have so many other pandemics that not only do we constantly live with but even entirely fail to notice:
American accent: I never get why Jamaicans and Australians never lose their accent, no matter where they migrate to, but I fail to get even more why Indians who stay in the US and then come back never lose that accent! It’s like those four years of college and five years of H1B1 change their speech DNA for good. Must be a virus, I suspect. The only cure: export them back to America where our Caucasian counterparts will waste no time in setting things straight. I mean, not even SRK was spared.
Homophobia: I used the ending ‘-phobia’ because I don’t know the Latin suffix for stupidity. The term is coined wrong. It’s not a fear, and certainly not a logical or rational one. So it must be a disease, possibly viral, one that goes largely undetected but crops up in conversations and other social settings. Luckily, it’s not contagious, but like a stink in an elevator, it marks the room with a party-pooping pallor.
Selfies: As common as the cold and shares traits with degenerative problems — most pertinently, the degenerative part. Except, instead of your system, it degrades all (or any remaining) sense of self-respect and dignity. In that sense, it’s like alopecia: incurable for the moment but a lot more self-effacing. It won’t kill you, but in advanced sufferers one will notice an instant puckering up of the mouth whenever faced with a lens.
Insta Reels: Everybody indulging in this is infected, but only the over-30 are symptomatic, the commonest and most obvious one being a sad, silent cry of despair for acceptability and social validation. I’d have said act your age, but the failure of that part of the brain to function properly is what initially landed you on TikTok and then Insta Reels in the first place. Other symptoms include a heightened sense of trust in one’s dancing and acting skills. Severe patients even fancy themselves singers and film editors. The real suffering here, however, is reserved for those who have to live with these talentless self-professed experts of nothing specific. The only treatment is the one called ‘Get a life’. Immediately.
Moral police: Once again the word ‘policing’ is stretched to cover usage that is way beyond its intended application. Strange because ‘extortion’ and ‘abuse’ already existed as perfectly good words to describe the activities of this ilk. From supervising how others dress to how they behave, I think the virus latches on to their insecurities and builds up deep-rooted paranoia with illusions of grandeur and a vague sense of control. Cure: isolation ward, preferably on a faraway island, ideally infested with hitherto undiscovered carnivorous species of posterior-eating ants.
This column is for anyone who gives an existential toss.