Prema Jayakumar

The last couple of decades have brought us to a world that is post, or past, a lot of things. We’ve seen post-modern writing, post-modern art, post-modern cinema, even post-truth politics. Well, now a new kind of living or rather an old type of living that feels strange and unfamiliar is opening up before us. A post-pandemic style of living.
For two years now, we have been living a curiously suspended existence. We’ve been working, but not going to office; students have been studying, but not going to school; we’ve been attending seminars, book-releases, but from our own homes. This last has worked well for some of us at least, in that we’ve been able to participate in events and discussions on subjects that interest us, but would normally not have been able to participate in because they take place in cities and venues far from us. Forced to do without face to face meetings, we’ve been meeting friends on platforms on the internet, spending time together. To take this to its absurd limits, there’s even been report of a marriage feast that was sent to each invitee’s house by courier and people ate together in front of the screens! People have found their way round (as they always manage to do) all the difficulties and got accustomed to a sort of distant intimacy. While not entirely satisfactory, it has worked.
Of course we have missed the physical presence of friends, relatives, colleagues, missed participating in weddings and other ceremonies. Even worse, missed being able to see a loved person who is ill and may not live long enough to outlast the pandemic. It will be a relief, even a joy to be able to do all this. We have perhaps even missed the ritual of dressing up for an occasion. But what happens when we are forced to do it day after day. It was so easy to forget that need in these stay at home days.
Those who liked travel would have missed it badly. Actually travelling around the country or even further abroad, could not be replaced by armchair travelling. (Of course, the armchair travellers still had it good). Now that travel is opening up, we are all two years older and for the senior citizens among us, this has meant that we have lost some of our physical strength and endurance. While the desire and the will remain, how much the bodies will bear remains a question.
And now schools are opening, bosses are asking the staff to report to office for work and quite a few of those who go back to those social surroundings would perhaps have forgotten what it is to live and work in actual physical intimacy, to have to share a workspace, get involved in the gossip around the water cooler or coffee dispenser, to school your face to hide the inappropriate expression and show the appropriate one. People are now going to crowd you, irritate you with their habit of picking up a pen from your table and leaving it elsewhere, disturbing the arrangement of your office table in their search for a particular sheet of paper. There was a time when one took all this in a matter of course manner, irritated, but resigned. How will we cope now? We had forgotten how irritating the chap at the next desk was. Or, the professor’s habit of staring one out of countenance as he took the class. All these will now have to be faced. While distance might or might not have lent enchantment, proximity is likely to bring a large dollop of disenchantment.
There is also the fact that one has to dress to go out, whether to workplace, school or college. The ease of doing work in comfortable clothes is no longer an option. The dress has to be formal, suitable, perhaps there are uniforms. The relaxation of not having to do those things is now lost. Commuting is, again, something people have got unused to. That will have to start again, perhaps with less number of options to choose from. Altogether, this brave new world we face, with the smugness of having defeated a dread virus, may not be as brave as we hoped when we sat housebound and solitary!