Life in the lockdown era has been erratic to say the least. I find it extremely boring to spend time at home, as I believe you would. There have been a myriad of reactions from public offices, the media, the not-so social media and the government in the larger sense in India that I now have reason to believe that Vladimir and Estragon were right.

In the most general sense of saying it, our lives are absurd and we do nothing but wait—not for Godot but—for the arrival of one thing or the other. We wait for our vaccinations, we wait for election results, and then the incumbent paying us with cash prizes and home appliances bartered as part of a democratic deal.

To a mind that follows the precepts evolved from the enlightenment, these things seem anywhere between annoying to I-want-to-kill-myself-now sort of an emotion. As a segue, need I mention the Great Kumbh Mela, or the Great Indian Covid Pass.

Every headline for the past few days have been about how a record breaking number of people have been infected in India. The last I read it was around the two-lakh mark. Anybody who understands an exponential function would understand that the number is sooner or later going to approach the standard doubling of cases per day and shoot upwards pretty much like the population function graph.

There is fear among the public, yes. But what shakes my noodles is that there is so much amusement among the public. Until a month ago, I did not know what a “selfie death” was—Google it. Now I find it hard to digest that people can celebrate a pandemic that is threatening to grossly reduce the population, run huge numbers into unemployment and create a very serious medical crisis due to lack of beds and spaces to treat newly infected people.

Let’s talk about the New Normal. Well, there is nothing to talk. There is no normal. How about that. The world, my dear friend, is mad. Different people know and understand different amounts of things. And these different people come together to execute different tasks that are essential to our livelihoods as a civilization. The world was already a messy curmudgeon; now it has become an ugly old hag.