A Walk to Remember- First one after Lockdown
By: Aditya Nema
Tags: Freedom, Human Behavior, Lockdown, Psychology, Covid 19

And after 3 months of house arrest, I finally decided to step out in the open. Well yeah, the craving for open spaces is analogous to a starved lion scrambling on even the slightest hint of food in its vicinity. After all, humans are social animals and as our evolutionary history characterizes us with a hunter-gatherer attribute, we can’t stay in confinement for very long. We are all-powerful yet helpless to change history. Before I could step out of my house, a set of daunting instructions from my Mom flooded the whole idea behind taking a walk in the open air. Last I remember, I received such instructions when I was joining the primary school. Anyway, as the old proverb goes, “prevention is better than cure”, as a matter of fact, that was the entire purpose of the lockdown you see. The bombardment of military-grade directives by Mom was so overwhelming that it would require a behavioral change and inadvertently calls for a change in my habits.

Turning the Non-declarative memory into declarative memory

Finally, I stepped out wearing a surgical mask, with earphones plugged in my mobile, a handkerchief (of course, even the slightest sound of a sneeze has the potential to trigger mob violence in India) and how can I forget the most important yet intangible asset, yes the right attitude! As I walked a few hundred meters, it seemed pretty normal outside there. A man taking a stroll with his German Shepherd, whose gilded eyes reflected its playfulness, whose skin whiffs off a scent of emancipation and whose wagging tail calls for unwavering focus to find something in the sea of tall grass. The man’s oblique stare puzzled me at once but then wearing a mask invariably gives you some confidence to stare back. I remembered the first commandment of physical distancing, be it a dog or his owner and I jumped over to the other side of the road to keep my radius secure.

As I walked along the link road connecting my residential campus to the Dam, which happens to be at a distance of half a kilometer from my house, the road was buzzing with traffic. The gas-guzzling machines are back in action and a meager number of pedestrians like me who could be counted on one’s fingers could be seen at the first glimpse. Walking along the narrow canal constructed beside the footpath, I chose to walk on the strip dumped with mud, pebbles, construction material, weeds, cow dung, and loads of junk which is quite difficult to understand unless you want to do research on roadside pavements. This strip ran along the footpath adjacent to it. My proposition was not to come in close proximity to the public walking on the footpath. Footpath’s so mainstream now right, try taking the road not taken :P. Let me then count it in some of the low key adventures of mine.

Have you noticed something odd here, all the things I have described till now right from getting out of my home to walking on the road, almost all the actions were implicit before Covid-19 struck. We needn’t think about how to walk, maintaining distance, observing each and every person around, every car or bike, in an apprehension that it could be carrying newly established thieves who would be eager to mug anyone on the streets or found away from the crowd. It’s terrible to think about all this while taking a stroll when I should actually be listening to the melodies and enjoying the weather. We are registering everything which was usual back then as unusual and that has changed the balance of the Non-declarative and declarative memory equation.

The Trust Deficit!

As I start climbing up the dam, there’s a sense of discomfort I begin to feel. I look up to realize all the eyes looking down upon me (No, I haven’t done anything wrong to them, just that they were descending the Dam). I don’t know why but it feels insecure and guilty walking beside strangers wearing masks with their eyes in the form of an X-ray scanner glaring at you. It gives a sensation of Big Brother from George Orwell’s ‘1984’, watching you and tearing you apart bit by bit. Just like there exists a minute gravitational force even between any two heavenly bodies in space separated by millions of miles, similarly there exist micro-units of trust even between two complete strangers. And I think the present situation over fears of contagion has destroyed that trust down to a fermi scale. It has created a void that would take months or even years to refill. The phenomenon called ‘asking help from strangers’ will not remain unscathed by the arrows protruding from a society in the post-COVID era.

The Long Walk back home…

As I begin to return to my home, I am reminded of the commandments. As I descend from the ramp of the reservoir, I construct a journey map (design thinking put to some good use here) imagining myself opening the entrance gate, sanitizing my hands in the porch followed by spraying disinfectant on the latch of the gate, entering the hallway and rushing towards the washroom with my mother blaring in the background, about the precautions I need to take. I quickly change and take a shower to wash away even the minuscule doubt of infection that might have crept into my mind listening to the news and the “educational content” from WhatsApp University spreading pervasively through Family groups.

This extent of imagination veers away the calm and sanity that a 40-minute walk had brought for a while. I keep on walking along the same worn-out strip of rubble, steering away from gas guzzlers, dogs as well as creatures from my own species (read humans). Later into that night, I think about going for a walk again the next day, however, the overload of involuntary actions turned into voluntary ones deters me to think about it. I feel I have been robbed off my freedom to even take a deep sigh in public.

Although I can’t even imagine what the migrants and people living below the poverty line would be experiencing right now, a quote from Percy B. Shelly’s Ode to the West Wind comes to my mind, “If winter is here, can spring be far behind”, which is quite apt in the current scenario. No matter how much we are hit by our predicaments, there is always light at the end of the tunnel, and it is imperative for us to be hopeful, to absorb the new normal, and to take care of ourselves and others in the best possible way.

And this saves another day for me…