To open or not to open

There is panic.  Yesterday when I went to buy juice, one of the employees stopped his scooter to tell me that I should not step outside the main gate and go towards Munirka as a case has been reported.  What if a case comes into the campus, he asked in a worried tone.  Then it will spread rapidly with the campus, he said.

Last Friday after a lot of deliberation the University to partially open up the administration building.  Paper work had piled up.  Bills had to be paid, salaries of employees appointed in projects had to be paid, and the funding agencies were demanding statement of expenditure and utilization certificate for the financial year.  So it made sense that the administration started functioning once more.

This Tuesday the administration has closed down again.  Apparently, one of the officer was exposed to coronavirus- we still do not know whether he is infected or not but someone in his locality was infected and he came in contact with that person- and therefore, as a precautionary measure the administration has been shut down once again. 

And as we move towards the end of the 4th phase of lock down, do we open up or do we not?  How much do we open up?  What happens if infection spreads?  How will we deal with it? Can our healthcare system cope with it?

The economy is now shambles. The worst affected are the migrant labourers.  The heart-rending pictures of the labourers making their way back to their villages- by cycle, by walking, and of late trying to get a seat on the train-tells us how their concerns were ignored before the lock down was implemented.  Many people who owned small businesses have been pushed into poverty. 

But the lock down has also taught me many things. Patience, and an acceptance that many times things will not go my way how much ever I want it to. 

Television shows during lock down

I am not a big fan of television or even movies as I find it difficult to sit through them without having crochet or knitting in my hands.  But lock down has ensured the unthinkable.  After my television stopped working (There is a problem with the remote and I have to call in the service people), I decided to shift to Amazon Prime and Netflix.  I remembered reading some good television shows and decided that this was the time to see them considering that the lock down keeps on extending.

So this blog is about some of the shows I really liked and disliked.

Gilmore girls- I watched two episodes and gave up.  Incessant banter and no character development.  I know that there are fans out there for this show but I could not watch it.  It was just Ugh!

The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel- Written by the same people who wrote Gilmore girls.  It was marginally better than  Gilmore Girls.  Season 1 was really good and I wished that they had stopped it there.  The show is about an upper class Jewish housewife who becomes a stand-up  comedian after her husband leaves her for his secretary.  Only he never disappears from her life.  He seems to be forever around.  And I could not figure out  how a professor in Columbia University could have such a lavish lifestyle. Of course, it is quite possible in Bollywood movies (In particular, I remember the awful movie called Hum Aapke hain kaun) and I assumed that it is possibly the same but it appears that the professor's wife comes from a rich background. Anyway, I saw couple of episodes of Season 2 and gave up.

Schitt's Creek- Marvellous.  I really enjoyed the improbable but warm, humorous story line.  What happens if a very rich family loses all its money?  This a Canadian TV drama. The Roses lose all their money and have to move to a small town called Schitt's creek which long time back they had bought as a joke.   The sitcom revolves around how the Roses adapt and grow as a family while living in Schitt's Creek.

Panchayat- Wonderful Hindi sitcom airing on Amazon Prime.  This is the first season of the production and shows an young man, who has slacked in Engineering college, accepting the post of panchayat secretary for want of better options.  He moves from city to the village of Phulera in Uttar Pradesh.  The panchayat head is a woman (it is reserved seat for women) who has happily ceded the official work to her husband while she takes care of their  home.  Nothing strange here as it is the reality in many cases.  Our hero has only one mission in life- how to get out of the village.  The only way out is to prepare for MBA entrance examination while dealing with the vagaries of the village.  The problems are commonplace- where should they put up the solar lights provided by the government (of course, outside the houses of each panchayat member),  how to placate the villagers with the insensitive family planning messages (the family planning messages were truly hilarious),  what name should be given to the newly born baby... the first season ends with the panchayat head (played by Neena Gupta) taking over her responsibilities (one has to see her learning the national anthem!).  I am looking forward to the second season.

Humsafar (Companion)- This is a Pakistani drama with Fawad Khan as Asher and Mahira Khan as Khirad in the lead.  Very popular in India.  The story is straight out of Mills and Boon with a wicked mother-in-law and a  cousin, Sara, who is madly in love with Asher and would do anything to marry him.  Asher ends up marrying Khirad, who also happens to be his cousin (her mother and his father are siblings).  As expected, they fall in love but the mother-in-law does not like Khirad because she is from a lower middle class background (her parents were teachers) while Asher belongs to an affluent upper class family.  The mother-in-law wants Sara to marry Asher.

In the first half, Khirad is naive and innocent, an easy prey for her mother-in-law and Sara, who engineer her downfall.  Pregnant, she is thrown out of the house while Asher does nothing to help her.  In the second half, Khirad emerges as a strong woman who holds a job as she brings up her daughter.  Needing money for the open heart surgery for her daughter, Khirad approaches her husband (I love the way she tells the secretary that her name is Umme Hareem (mother of Hareem) to gain entrance to her husband's office).  We know how that is going to end but I liked the way Khirad holds her own and reunites with Asher on her own terms.  Even as it ends in a happy way,  the viewers know that both Asher and Khirad will have to work very hard on their marriage and no one can walk over Khirad anymore. 

Zindagi Gulzar hai (Life is a garden)- Another Pakistani Drama which was also popular in India.  There are 26 episodes of this drama and the plot revolves around two sets of families- The Murtuzas and the Junaids. 

The Murtuza family is lower middle class.  The father has two wives.  His first wife gives birth to three daughters.  So he marries a second time so that he can a son.  The first wife lives separately, works a teacher and ensures that her three daughters are well-educated.  She also ensures that she infuses a strong sense of independence and at the core is a strong plea for women's education. However, the girls, especially the eldest one, Kashaf , develops insecurities because her father has abandoned the family.

The Junaids are obscenely rich (a la  The Social Butterfly written by Moni Mohsin for The Friday Times).  The father has a business and the mother works for NGO.  They have a daughter, Sara, and a son, Zaroon.  

Of course, we know that Kashaf and Zaroon are going to end up together.   The problem is that while there was a plea for girl's education in the first half, it was undone in the second half by bringing to forefront the patriarchy.   The mother, who has worked hard to ensure her daughters get good education, now has only one bee in her bonnet- get them married.  And Kashaf, who says she would rather be single, is guilt tripped into marriage just to satisfy the society.  She, of course, marries Zaroon.  Zaroon wants to marry her because she is what he considers an ideal woman- educated, has a job and yet is conservative.  She will look after him, cook for him, sew button on his shirt (there is a scene where she sews a button on Zaroon's shirt and all I wanted to do was to tell him to learn to do so himself).  It does not matter that both Kashaf and Zaroon had similar education and hold similar government jobs.  In the end the viewer knows that it would be Kashaf who makes the compromises.  That was problematic for me.

I want to end here by saying just as Pakistani TV shows are popular in India, so are Indian movies and shows in Pakistan.  If Fawad Khan and Mahira Khan are popular in India, Aamir Khan and Shahrukh Khan are popular in Pakistan.  As the governments entangle, the people would rather know what is it like across the border.  As I watched both Humsafar and Zindagi Gulzar hai, I found the themes resonating.  Home tuition, of course!  Traffic jams, of course!  Taps running dry, but of course!  Power cuts in the poorer section of the cities, nothing new!  Unaffordable health care, nothing new. And I whooped when I saw the pot-holed roads.  Both countries know how to mix bitumen in water and have the same road laying strategy. 

The great digital divide

We are now two months into lock down- one of the most stringent in the world.  Of course, the main concern for the educators is how we are going to complete the syllabus, when are we going to open, and as researchers, we are also worried about our laboratories.

When the lock down was announced, my students decided to freeze down the cells and store them in -80oC.  Some of the cells were stored in liquid nitrogen tanks.  After two months, we ended up losing all the cells stored in one liquid nitrogen tank because we could not fill it.  We moved the cells from the other liquid nitrogen tank into -80oC.  Of course this is summer, a very mild one but still intense.  This means we have to run Air conditioners non-stop.  Given the condition of wiring (the engineering department has not got around to changing the wiring system), we have asked one of the lab attendant (who has not been paid since the lock down began) to come to the lab every day and ensure that everything is okay.   Even then, my students and I are apprehensive- will our cells survive?  How long will it take to restart the lab?

This is just one aspect.

When the lock down began, the faculty started looking into ways of finishing the syllabus. Many of them have finished the course by sending the students power point slides, hoping that they can download it and study.  The first year Ph.D. students, however, have to write a term paper and a research proposal as part of their course work.  With great enthusiasm, we told these students to complete both the assignments during the lock down.  They immediately sent us an email saying that most of them do not have internet connection and therefore, cannot access research articles/journals.  Hence, all such assignments can be completed only after the lock down is lifted.  We were silenced.

One of my student later told me that the internet connection in her place only works intermittently.  Most of them time she uses the data card in her phone to download and access research articles.  Another student told me that he has written part of his thesis but  cannot send it to me due to erratic internet connection.

That brings me to the great digital divide.

Living in Delhi, it often escapes my attention that electricity and internet are not available 24 hr in other cities- especially the small towns and villages where most of our students reside.  Even in Delhi, children living in urban slums do not access to 24 hr electricity and internet.  They also do not have privacy.  One room is shared by all the members of the family.

Private schools and private colleges have been conducting online classes- but these are accessible only to a minuscule section of students. The government schools do not have required infrastructure to conduct online classes and their students do not have access to internet.  For us, in government universities- the infrastructure is available but students do not have access to internet.