2020 - In Retrospect

For me personally the notable event of the year was... Guess what? No, not Covid. Not the Work-From-Home concept. No, not the onset of online purchases; nor the film industry tending to take a backseat to Netflix, Prime Video, or Hotstar...

No more guessing. The year marked my 80 years of life on planet Earth. I recall vividly my grandfather’s words in his 1940 diary, on the 22 October leaf: “Meena delivered a male child; normal delivery; both doing well.”

Yes, I entered the world not to make a difference, but to join the teeming millions. Otherwise, thunderstorm, cloud burst, lightning or other elements would have announced my arrival to the world with Mahendra Kapoor’s soundtrack of the Bhagavat Gita lines: Yada Yada Hi Dharmasya, Glanir Bhavati Bharata, Abhyutthanam Adharmasya. Tadatmanam Srjamy Aham – whenever Dharma is in peril, I will manifest myself on this Earth.

On my 80th birthday my SFV Rudram-Chamakam group friends paid reverential visits to my house as Aunty and I called on my solitary senior member at his house to pay our respects. The group organized a special chant-session in my honour in which our learned Shri Muthuraman chanted with incredible ease Ayushya Suktam, Bhagya Suktam, Roga Nivarana Suktam, Navagraha Suktam, Shatamanan Bhavati slokam...At the end I checked if he was by chance the Veda Adhyayanam Asthana Vidwan to Sringeri Matam. What a wonderful flow.

Originally my sons and their families had planned to visit India to celebrate the event. But by then the old saying got slightly modified - Man Proposes, Covid Disposes.

Yes, Nature took its toll this year in the form of Covid, for reasons best known to it. Medical world braved it with a record-time invention of vaccines to combat. At last, relief seems in sight. Meanwhile I have declined two marriage invitations from Chennai in February and March, pending the vaccine shot.

As an aftermath, Work From Home is here to stay – if the thinking of the corporate sector is anything to go by. The business community lost no time in cashing in on it. We now have scores of WFH furniture, gadgets, and a host of ‘immunity’ products as well.

Online purchase, or home delivery, is another lifestyle change that is fast overtaking the conventional shopping method. Yes, just read a message that D’Mart too has started online service. The other day the boy at the vegetable shop told Aunty not to bother to come to shop physically but to order them over the phone. He unleashed a list of apartments in SFV who do so regularly. That has set Aunty thinking, but with her habitual apprehension - what if I get rotten tomatoes?

On physical shopping, Easyday has vacated and Shoppy Mart has flooded the allotted space with goods. We read mixed reactions about the latter’s quality of stock and price. A small-time vegetable vendor has pitched tent outside Oak gate for a few hours in the morning – seemed a contended family until Easyday disturbed his peace of mind with setting up business a few yards away, on Wednesdays and Saturdays with a 10% discount to Easyday card holders. Perhaps this reinstates the concept, Survival of the Fittest. Regardless, our own co-residents, Girish and Hemangi, have been having brisk sales of their organic products, for whom quality comes first.

With nowhere to go for a chat, and confined to homes, sedentary habits are fast gaining upper hand. To cash in on that, the likes of Netflix, Prime Video, or Hot Star, lose no time to come with up their own entertaining, gripping or time-pass short movies, or series, seasons, or episodes. Right now we are busy watching The Crown, with its good, bad and indifferent episodes. But full credit to the power-packed one-upmanship dialogues and the British humour.

A virtual general body meeting was held to ratify the election of new Managing Committee members to the Association. So far each MC team has left a mark of itself with one innovative measure or the other. The new MC has thus an onerous task ahead. We wish them all success.