Lockdown has taken us back to innocent times, searching answers to all left-behind questions

Charles Darwin once said, “The savage admires not a steam engine, but a piece of coloured glass, is lost in astonishment at the artificer. Our faculties are more fitted to recognize the wonderful structure of a beetle than the universe.” The corona lockdown has actually reactivated many of such faculties which had either been underused or lying unused in some corner of our brain.

From the time any of us grew up, we were only told to make it big, be a scientist, be a doctor, be a successful business man and the list goes on. It was only during initial childhood as a kid, we were allowed to just be ourselves and that is when we were viewing that morsel of rice lying on the floor as our universe, made ourselves a joke and laughed when others laughed at us.

We rolled on the floor, floated paper boats and slid down the slope in the open during rains. We never knew which colour was called what but we dipped our fingers, cheeks, actually the whole body in all the possible colours. We never realised what the difference was between wearing and not wearing clothes and we didn’t realize what it meant to lose something. We would keep something somewhere and didn’t know what to say when we were asked about it. It was about playing piano on a computer key board and thumping drums on all the possible utensils at home.

But once school started and we entered college and work life, all this innocence withered away somewhere into oblivion.

The lockdown has unexpectedly brought back that innocence. We were forcing our ever curious mind to squash all the questions which our surroundings raised inside us. All of a sudden, we are looking for answers to those figments of curiosity and exploring those deep corners of our houses which we never realized, they existed.

Our life has been limited from the larger universe we were craving to expand in, to the boundaries of our house. The house is suddenly the world. A friend just called up to say that he spent a few hours looking for his glasses, mopping the house, cleaning utensils, playing video games, talking about Netflix series to the neighbours he never had really spoken. He ended the call by asking me if I liked playing tambola as there were online groups doing that and he had also played it from his balcony with someone from another terrace shouting the numbers!

I was reminded of the black polka dots on the beetles back which I had just caught yesterday. I had barely caught it before it slid on my palm and flew off. I was wondering if ever I will ride the beetle’s back like Ram and Lakshman on hanuman’s shoulders! The world inside my head is surely not the same!