Sanitizing my sanity amidst COVID-19

Picture taken from Articles by: Wang Wen, Jia Jinjing, and et al.

Can it get any worse?

Of course, I know the answer but I wanna stay in denial and want this terrible nightmare to be over in a blink. Yet, the tele in my home keeps screaming day and night about how things are drastically changing and effecting each and everyone of us around the world. Some of you might want me to turn that God damn tele off or change the channel for the sake of my own health but you see, I have an old set of amazing Parents-in-Law who would like to keep themselves updated with as much depression as possible, so they could pray every second of their lives and make their Jannah (Heaven) affirmative while on other hand I go through anxiety attacks because my sanity is fragile or maybe because I haven’t been through the Partition (of India and Pakistan). Hence, those same channels stream around my brain in the darkest hours of lengthy nights, (in which I was suppose to be a romantic wife as per the standards of being Newly Wedded Association) but unfortunately, we couple have no time for that but to survive another day without getting infected or infecting his parents.

Can it be controlled?

Of course, not. I, you, none of us can control it. People getting infected, dying, doctors, nurses, healthcare staff,  desperately working to save lives, making places for the funerals in the churches, mosques, they even have to arrange mortuary freezers for the deads because we’re dying in bulk and can’t be put aside to be buried one by one. The infected people can’t even see their loved ones or be buried away by them, they haven’t even seen the ones they once couldn’t imagine to live without. I cannot stop thinking about the death toll it speaks of in Italy, Spain and US, more so in Italy, I hear 900+ deaths a day and I don’t understand how do they cope with it as a nation, what motivates the doctors to treat another hopeless case where they help the patients to have a last video call with their loved ones or to send a last picture to their children, parents or siblings. I cannot stop imagining the scenes which I’ve only heard of and not experienced. It’s getting worse in my country too and people are continuously being warned, the country’s on semi- lock down but still, we all know that it will spread. It reminds me of the Dan Brown’s Inferno, in which Langton speaks of “Black Death” which broke down in Middle ages in Europe and the big white “beak masks” also known as the plague masks, doctors used to wear to treat the ill person. Reading about that in completely different times just felt like it was a mere a fictional writing but now having read that and comparing it with the similar situation literally pinches my heart to reality, and I could feel every word and pain he described in his book. That’s another problem of a reader, they feel a lot and they can live many lives through a single book, now imagine actually becoming part of such event, which once you read in some random book of interest (I can feel the chills down my spine).

Can malignant people be managed?

I wanted to be rather put together before talking about such people but unfortunately my vocabulary has no bounds in describing their unintelligent moronic behavior. People are continuously being warned by the government about the infection, however there is a set of pathetic losers believing that the Corona Virus is all bogus and less of the reality. It’s crazy but yes, there are those who are not willing to sit home and have planned long crazy adrenaline rushing holidays for themselves and their entire families and yes, they have been either put behind bars or in fact, I was watching the video the other day in which police men were punishing young boys by making them do the sit ups with their ears pulled and arms crossed, by the side of the roads. What else this government can do? Our Prime Minister have been continuously making efforts and speaking to the media as well as putting efforts with the monthly ration for those on their daily wages. All we have to do is be the heroes during this pandemic, and by not doing that we are not only putting ourselves in danger but a chain of such people is putting the whole world to collapse and yet we all fail to recognize it. These same people wanted to do nothing and sit on their bums for the rest of life, excuse my language but how can I or anyone keep calm when each and every type of media is screaming at the top of their lungs to “stay home, stay safe”, even when I ring my mum, it doesn’t give me those telephonic beeps, it instead tells me how can I protect myself from this deadly disease and how can I protect my loved ones with by only sitting at home, washing my hands for 20 seconds and breaking the chain but no, no, now since we’ve been given off for 3/4 weeks, we cannot put ourselves to rest but we are ready to put the world to Rest In Peace!!!!!

When this all will be over?

I have a simple one-liner for this, “Nobody knows when”, however I can’t just say it (even though I just did but we can ignore it). This virus have taken lives over lives, starting from China, where it is rather controlled or at least that’s what the media actually says about it. Anyways, we all have to understand that Chinese people listened to its government, they took it serious, they might not knew what exactly was coming towards them but they took as much precautions and safeguarding measurements as possible. Understanding the facts that even some of the G7 countries have the worse record of death tolls, even though they have best of the economy and healthcare facilities, yet even they couldn’t handle this virus. They’re going through the darkest of the times, the whole world has been put to rest, the economy is at the verge of the breaking point, even the ones best in position are crying for help then how can we keep calm and look over the mistakes they made. We don’t have such well-designed governmental system or healthcare or cleanliness or flourished economy, we’re one of the developing countries and with situation like this we might only reverse towards being underdeveloped. As every channel, every media, even social media, government, everyone keeps telling us to stay home and stay safe, that’s the best we can do. Just to become a better productive human being, we can pray, I literally mean do your prayers, whether you are Christian, Hindu, Sikh, Jew or Muslim etc. we all believe in some power, if not power than in science, anything, any freaking thing, so just pray to that power, but don’t forget to wash hands, keep distance, cough in your elbow or wear mask and gloves and then just PRAY.

A Lost Kid

A poem I wrote an year ago, when the bomb blasts were at its peak in Pakistan, they still are though but I pray things change and people wouldn’t have to loose their relatives, their loved ones.

A kid weeps
& cleans his nose
wipes his tears
& tries to arose.

He ponders over the situation
& feels he is stuck.
Thinks over it again
& says he’s in muck.

He walks randomly
still in illusion
wishes to die
but still in confusion,

thinks continuously
whats the conclusion?
He gets no answer
again tears blur his vision

He kicks a stone
and gets hurt badly
he thinks its better
then weeping madly.

He asks Allah
whats next?
Is this my life’s end?
Or only a test?

He then raises to his feet
& looks for his mother
but under the broken marbles
he only finds his sister,

who lies there unconsciously
smiling peacefully at her brother
kid gets teary again
sadness grows bitter

Soon he realizes hes all alone
his family and friends are all gone.
He stares at his hands in misery
cries out bleakly.

And then he hears another blast
And his heart beats crazily.
He knew that somewhere
another kid has lost his family.

He raises his hands to pray,
asking Allah to guide him,
to dont let him go astray,
with hope he says ameen.

And just during the moment of grim
Another blast explodes every bit of him.

Writing Accents

This is the most annoying issue for me now days. I don’t actually have problem with the people writing in their accents but writing in an authentic accent sounds fair.

When we talk about books, we understand the fact that a writer wants his reader to feel the voice of the characters back in their heads or to imagine how they might sound, whether its British, American, American African, Scottish, Irish, French etc. It’s the writer’s need to create magic in his words to make his readers understand different accents. And of course there are no rules when you write accents, at least no spelling rules.

For example;
“W’en old man Rabbit say ‘scoot,’ dey scooted, en w’en ole Miss Rabbit say ‘scat,’ dey scatted. Dey did dat. En dey kep’ der cloze clean, and day ain’t had no smut on der nose nudder.” Uncle Remus – A Story About Little Rabbits, Joel Chandler Harris.

To some extent, reading accents by writers are way understandable than the people whom you come across on social networks. It’s like as if either they don’t know English and they’re trying hide their embarrassment by cutting on their words, spellings, grammatical rules etc or they’ve created devastating English rules of their own, which are like alien language to the most of the people, actually almost all of the people.

Shortening up words like “going to” into “gonna” or “want to” into “wanna”, there’s no abnormality in it because they are kind of understood terms when you speak English, whether you’re an American or British. Even if “because” gets shorten to “cuz”, it could be somehow acceptable for the maximum people of course not for those who are learning English themselves.

But how on earth damaging the words, making the sentences look grammatically creepy and torturing the whole concept of English makes one look cool. In fact it’s pretty distracting and it indeed gives headache when you keep reading a sentence like thrice and at last you would have to tell your friend to repeat it in English rather than “Slanglish”. Why confusing people when you can write a normal well-mannered English. It’s like trying to pretend that you’re patient when you’re actually perfect. Every time I face such friends on social network I give such expressions of awe (since I’m so expressive) that my mum guess’s it right away that I’m reading some nasty accent written on my screen.

The fact which really amused me that mostly British South Asians, who had either migrated themselves from countries like, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh etc or their ancestors migrated, write accents more than the people to whom English is actually a native language. Since half of my family lives in England and I’ve moved to Pakistan few years back. My own cousins, friends etc write such annoying English that I prefer not to talk to them on chat; I rather talk to them on phone,at least it saves me time to do more things than to type and make them repeat their each and every word CUZ DEH NEVA GONNA CHENJ N DUH MAH HED IN!!

Toodles 🙂 x