2020: The year that this was!

I was scrolling my pictures yesterday in Google photos and the only pictures I could find were of all the dishes that I cooked in these last nine months. And I started thinking, so this is what Google will throw up a few years later, that I just cooked in 2020!

Strangely, despite no pictures, this is not what I will remember. This year is going to go down in memory lanes as one of the strangest yet most remarkable times. With wild fires in Australia and severe protests in India and Hongkong marking the beginning of the year, the little hope I had that the things will be back to normal soon turned out to be just that, wishful thinking.

In my ten years of stay in Mumbai, I never saw streets this empty with police sirens blazing and an eerie feeling piercing right through my bones, when I stepped out acting on a friend's advice to not rely on hope and stock grocery for a month, because situation seems to be bleak.

We had a safe home and Amazon to deliver things, even though late. There were thousands stranded and slowly news of death and illness started to reach from other countries to neighborhoods and then friends and family. The madness of sanitizing, prayers in desperation to keep loved ones safe and battling this unwarranted isolation day in and out, at times got better of most of us.

2020 asked a pertinent question, “what will you do, when there is nowhere else to go?”. 

Probably the only answer was: You go within.

And that's another battle that you wage. A strange conundrum, silence outside and a storm within. Most of us did pick up new skills, found out the ones hidden and also relied heavily on books, Netflix, Ludo King and WhatsApp to keep us going. Work became a happy distraction too. But I do hope that we got enough time to look inside and calm the storms and find an anchor that holds us and keeps us grounded whether the storms rage outside or within.

As the year is about to end, I really don't think that a change of date on calendar is going to magically align everything. Although, Jupiter and Saturn did align last week and newspapers were flooded with articles on the rarity of the event and also a lot of noise on the significance of 2020 in light of this. Forgetting probably, that calendar is a human invention. Guess, we all love stories and more so, the stories that have a clear beginning, an engaging conflict and a marked end. We all have been through enough trauma and conflict, some more than others and I feel, we all are hoping this ends here.

Hopefully, it will, but even if it doesn't, this year has shown us what we are capable of when we are stripped down to basics. Also, that what is most valuable in pursuit of all the means of livelihood. Are we really that busy or productive or just whiling time away in the garb of work and overlooking things which are of utmost importance? That is a healthy body, a stable mind and a support system to get one through difficult days. And above all a meaning and purpose, that gives something to look forward to and a deeply held belief in goodness of life to be able to say that this is not how the story is going to end.

Wish you all good health, resilience, inner peace and insurmountable courage to beat all the odds and carve out a wonderful story in the coming years! And a very happy 2021 indeed!