We are tired of the very home that we used to rush towards everyday after hectic work hours. The very homes that we hesitated to leave behind every morning is desperate to throw us outside as if it is also tired of us. Avoiding daily traffic and pollution was good for a couple of weeks. But as the lock down kept on getting extended for months, our natural thirst for warm, close, 3D and person to person interaction became as imminent ingredient for meaningful life as anything could ever be. The very driving we loathed, we are missing hardly. The punctured tires are no more a matter of anxiety.
The musty jackets remain locked up and clean inside our closets for weeks and weeks with no one to scrub the dusty surface everyday. Sneakers have grown permanent wrinkles around their face.
Turning every room and every corner of the house into four class rooms and two office spaces for two students and two teachers and converting every digital screen into office desk and blackboard would not be a Sisyphean act had we not to repeatedly reassign their original role back every evening. The unfortunate screens were already overwhelmed by their masters’ demand for social interaction, entertainment, information and communication. They are either being watched or being charged. Tough life. Hugh!!
The relief of not having to live a life of strict routine did not last long. You have now four class routines to match each other instead of just one. To make sure that other three classes run undisturbed, a life time loud professor now has turned into a comfortable close-talker. However, the bored and uninspired audience stay behind the cold screen with muted microphone and switched off video buttons to save the expensive bandwidth strength.
Not knowing what the residents behind the dead screen are doing and how their faces are reacting does not make any difference to a “passionate” professor. Sooner or later, if its not for the students, the professor definitely has to learn the lesson. For a professor, anxiety and stress do not get any chance to show the symptoms when he is the only source of hope for distressed students.
Out of nowhere, the pandemic pushed us into the suddenly dug, deep and slippery trench of the digital space. The communication that took weeks now takes minutes. As we miss each other desperately, we meet each other more frequently online, we chat more, we text more and we expect even more prompt action than before. We sit more and we bow down more to the tyranny of digital screens.
Its not just the old people who are the most likely victims of the pandemic. The sofa seems to be speeding up to its demise as carrying eighty kilogram of flesh and bones for hours is too much for its age. One of the laptop that I dearly bought as a graduate student in 2011 is already down and battery of the other has stopped working; with no hope of repair shop opening soon. Now I am sharing my laptop with my younger one. Yes, even the three grader younger one has digital class everyday!!
The chiya we are missing is not just a hot sugary drink. It was the necessary grease that oiled our sometimes funny and sometimes morbid moments that we had around the gushy and sticky rectangular tables of some 8×8 samosa restaurant around the quirky corners of the street nearby our office. Another professor downstairs knocking your door for a cup of gossip coffee sounds like a fairy “tail” now; yes our forgotten tail. I am afraid if I might forget to display my Namaskar to my colleagues when things finally get back to normalcy.
I wonder what my office desk is doing with layers of dust on its top. My coffee mug and my coffee maker. We did not even have time to pack up our cookies as the strict lock down was imposed with little or no prior notice. I miss my wide double screens to do my data visualization and modeling. Now, half of my analytical time goes to switching between windows of emails, R console, excel sheet, SPSS, TeX editor and PDF. Zooming in and out eats up another quarter of the time. The deadlines have not postponed as fast. Replying to referee reports and grants has accelerated as everyone is spending more time on screens globally. People are desperate to show that they are working lest unemployment is the most terrible experience an educated elite can imagine.
As if the dark clouds of AI was not enough, the pandemic injects even more venomous fear of his ten thousand years old skill going obsolete sooner than later in a blink of an eye. Though there is no guarantee for the next paycheck, a professor keeps dragging his professional cum personal life amidst the ever closer fear of pandemic reaching his doorsteps.