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As the second wave of the virus takes its course all over the nation, discussions that revolve around the pandemic have become so commonplace that they hardly generate the same emotions we encountered just a year back, when the virus first hit the nation.
Nevertheless, if I take a stroll down memory lane, I can still remember how we were all in a state of pandemonium, even days before the virus had held the nation by its clutches.
The next thing you know, as if in a blink of an eye, the said mysterious virus that you might have encountered through your TV sets is now going to affect your life in ways unimaginable.
I was on the 10th day of this long study leave – that we got before we had our last exam – when the news broke out about how the same will be postponed to a date that was still undecided.
Strangely, in the latter half of the final year of high school, no matter how much you might have loathed your school life at one point, you still develop a sweet spot for the same. You wish school hadn’t ended that soon.
From how I perceived it, my life had basically come to a standstill. I didn’t feel the need to attend to my chapters for an exam that I didn't even know was going to commence in the first place.
Because, for all I knew, there was always some talk about our internal assessment marks to be substituting our final scores in the report card.
By the month of May, when my juniors were directly promoted without having the need to sit for an exam and started with their online classes, I would still wonder as to what answer do I give to my relatives when they inquire about which class I’m in.
To say that we were off the course in the said roadmap would be an understatement when we didn’t even know what the future held for us.
It felt like years since I last saw my friends. What we planned to be small meetups at cafes had then changed into virtual meetings.
But that didn’t in any way dull the ardent desire to actually go out because no matter how much I loved to just laze around on the couch with a favourite book, the lockdown proved to be difficult when I would realise that the last time I was actually out was to sit for my Economics exam and how I thought this was funny but it irked me at the same time.
Times were already grim every time we saw a fresh surge in the COVID cases.
Now that I didn’t have to worry about assignment deadlines and tuitions, I realised I could focus my energy and my time on all those things that I always wanted to do, which my otherwise busy schedule prevented me from doing so.
At the end of the day, even though most of my endeavours didn’t really prove to be a success, I was still content in a way because now I at least don't bear the regret of not having tried the same things earlier.
If you come to think about it, Shakespeare gave us some of his best literary work while he was in quarantine during the plague. Newton began his work on optics and invented Calculus during the Great Plague of 1665-64 and even though I’m in no way romanticising the current dreadful situation that we are in, remaining hopeful in these extraordinary times and doing things that we are truly passionate about is not going to hurt.
Now as I start my second semester as a student of Delhi University, I still find it so hard to believe that most of my classmates that have become such good friends of mine in such a short span of time are actually people who I’ve never even met in person.
Sure, I sometimes wish things were different and I would get to work and associate with them over coffee at some cosy cafe but for now sharing google docs, google drive folders, and making collaborative playlists on Spotify will do.
All of this at the end of the day has taught me to remain hopeful about meeting my new friends some day and having this campus life that I always wanted to have. As the famous line from The Shawshank Redemption goes, ‘hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things and no good thing ever dies.’
(The author is a first year student of BA Sociology (Hons) at the University of Delhi. This is a blog and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
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