Life after the Lock Down

Quite a long break this was after the lock down stories as there was nothing much to write about. Actually there's not much even now but still I will go for it on the last day of the year 2020.

First of all, the lock down made me stop my 5 hour a day commute & it was such a great relief that the travel stays minimum even as there are no restrictions.

The other important realization was that I can live on restaurant food for many days without getting ill. That proves the success of a number of immunity improving tactics I have been consciously pursuing in the past year.

On the Stock market front, there's both good & bad happenings - Good that I held onto my stocks (not 100% but at least 75%) throughout the Corona crisis & almost stopped intraday trading but bad that I have become too indulged in options.

In other news, the overall life remains the same - clueless & very busy doing nothing - but still not so sad which again is nice considering I don't have much going around left in me at the age of 40 plus.

Quarantine Tour

The journey began on a clear monsoon morning. It was an escape mission to balance work & life on the peak of the corona pandemic just a day before our home was declared quarantined. 

Day 1

First day was about long drives which finished the day quickly but the evening, as usual, took its own time to be over.

Day 2

A visit to the city was planned on Sunday to fight the boredom, pass time etc. but rain gods were not in favor. It rained heavily almost till afternoon making it hard to go outside at all.

Day 3

Monday was exciting as I was to join the game of trades after the weekend break but still the fatigue of not going home for 2 days had begun knocking on my being. It was a very lonely day & it took ages to be over.

Day 4

Tuesday came out to be a busy day at work with visit to various distant locations & came to an easy end.

Day 5-6-7

So now a daily routine was in place in this isolation trip to work. I wake up around 5.30 as usual but instead of making my own tea & breakfast, I go to street vendor in the market & fetch tea in plastic bag. As there's not much to do after having bath at around 7.30 with hot water (Courtesy electric heating rod), I just surf internet on mobile & laptop till the shop opening time. The day goes very slowly except when we have to go in the far stations.

Evenings are the saddest part of the setting as your body, mind & soul demand relaxation, enjoyment & peace - all at once & you have nothing to offer.

Day 8

Visit to the city was planned on the Saturday on the pretext of delivering some document. The real target was to get my shaving kit & some good snacks for breakfast which was done successfully. Also, I set the stage for passing the Sunday in the city by leaving the bike in parking.

Day 10-14

The Sunday turned out to be not worth mentioning so I am skipping it. Anyway, the weekdays were just carbon copies of the days spent in the previous week - only that I had adjusted to the new setup & the days flew away too soon.

Day 15

Here was another Saturday for which I had planned a (very) long journey to home on my bike to spend weekend in the city i.e. visit malls, eat fast food, sleep in good bed etc etc. (There's nothing left in the etc part actually).

I think the journey was not supposed to end so soon as I encountered heavy rains on the way, almost as if the sky was crying to see me going home.

Lock down 2020 - Extended version

The lock down story was getting too long for one blog, so I will continue the saga in a new blog.

Day 24:

This extended lockdown feels like we are trapped in a bad movie & we are once again entering the movie hall after the interval. Actually our life itself has become like an art movie where the poor or middle class characters cannot afford to go out & enjoy themselves. The story starts, develops & finishes inside the 2-3 room house only.

Day 25:

Today marked one more visit to the city office for some administrative work. The atmosphere & feel are exactly the same as 15 days before when I had clicked images of various crossroads. 

Day 30 / April 21:

I have realized today that I may have messed up the numbering of the days in between, so today I am adding few dates along with the number of day. When you have almost exact routine for many days, you can't believe the calendar telling you that so many days have gone away as the memory fails to separate one from the other.

Day 31 :

Utavali had been calling me since Saturday, I hoped it will stop calling but finally I had to make the plan for Monday visit. The trip was both successful & failure - successful because the issue for which we went there was resolved but failure because of the new fault which occurred when we were on the way & for which we were not ready.

Day 33 :

Today the coronavirus infection tally stands at around 18 lakhs & deaths figure is around 2 lakhs. Indian figure is at about 25000 infections & 700 deaths. The situation looks very much under control here but this could be due to testing limitations in a country with more than 1 billion people.

Meanwhile the trading losses are on the rise & I can't stop even after realizing that the markets remain easy for very short period only. Today is the last trading day of the week so I have already planned for work on Saturday.

Also, after finishing 3 suspense thrillers, presently afternoon is the time for "a brief history of time".

Day 34/35 :

So as per the plan I began my journey early on Saturday morning & reached site around 9.30 am. The deserted road with almost zero vehicles & people was ideal for the cabling work we intended to accomplish. As expected it took more than a day & I had to stay the night there. Next day was a working Sunday amidst the curfew in a small town. It was a refreshing break from the dull lock down routing of the past month.

Here's a beautiful autumn season scenery I shot on the way.

Day 36-40 :

April series F & O expiry carried me through the last 4 days of the month of April - atmosphere was just as heated in the markets as it is outside in this season. The volatile movements captivated me totally & 4 days vanished in thin air. Now as it is over, I have started recalling other activities like writing this blog after 4 days.
It seems like people are now out of the panic of coronavirus & eager to come out of lock down & carry on with their normal lives as soon as possible. 

The statistics of the Covid-19 pandemic as on 30th April is taken as a screenshot. These numbers now justify the hysteria 2 months back when many could not comprehend the gravity of the situation.

 

Day 42:

The second extension was not very much obvious like the first one & so it may be quite disheartening for many people. Even though 2 weeks' extension is declared at present but  now on few may believe it to be the the last one.
Now this is turning out to be a nightmare that hurts you 24*7 and refuses to go away for many days. Once again, I have to admit that I feel much less disturbed by this locked down scenario than most people & that creates serious question regarding my life.

Day 43 / May 4:

During the long weekend break from stock markets, I got a lot of free time to think and I felt very much guilty for giving so little attention (& visits) to my work. So it was decided to make a Monday visit putting aside all other plans. The day was almost uneventful tiring journey of about 170 KMs in one day.


Day 51 / May 12 :

The past week (4-8 May) was one more in the series of disappointing weeks which was actually expected as the markets chose to remain range bound after whipsaws in both March & April. But most people, including me, realized it quite late that the movements in the past two months were a rare phenomena & you can't expect it to keep going on & on.

Also, I made another record of bike riding on Thursday courtesy Tankhala which is about 10 KM further away from Naswadi.

Day 56 / May 17 :

So today is the last day of the lockdown phase-3 which began on May 4 & people are eagerly hoping for relaxations in the phase 4 as they already know it is not to be removed completely. My Sunday evenings are mostly spent in multiplexes for the past 12 years but it will take many more weeks to get them opened looking at present scenario.


Day 57:

Here I end the lock down 2020 diary. The lock down 4.0 is more like lock-open 1.0 where the restrictions have been lifted considerably. As I passed through the city on my way to Naswadi, all the barricades along with guards securing those spots were taken off from city roads & people were seen moving around freely.

The night curfew from 7 pm to 7 am is still to be maintained all over the India, malls & multiplexes are not to be opened yet, private bus services are not to be operational, dining out is prohibited & social distancing is strictly to be followed everywhere. The road to be free of all of these restrictions will be a new journey & maybe another brand new story.

Lock down 2020

First reported on the last days of the year 2019 in China's Wuhan - a port city with 1.1 million population - as an unusual type of Pneumonia, the novel coronavirus infected about 3.9 lakh people & caused 17,000 deaths in less than 3 months.

Here is my story from the time the authorities started taking serious measures to contain the epidemic after listening to the horror stories of countries like Iran, Italy, Spain & lastly the US.

It began with a Janta Curfew on Sunday, 22nd March which was mostly very successful barring few overzealous people celebrating the end of curfew with fireworks & rallies.

I spent the afternoon in successfully finishing the novel 'Inferno' which I had been reading for the past 3 months at least. Ironically the plot of 'Inferno' is virus creation by some mad scientist with the target to reduce the population of earth.

Then there was the issue of how to commute to & from my faraway workplace without using public transport, the solution of which came in the breaking news at 9 pm in the form of the complete lockdown of the state until March 31.

Day 1:

A completely uneventful Monday except for a V shape movement in the Nifty & Sensex. Afternoon was spent closely observing the snake dance of the stock markets of India & evening marked the beginning of writing about the lockdown days.

Day 2:

Tuesday seems to have been erased from my memory as I have nothing to recall about it, maybe because there's nothing to separate it from the previous day.
To compensate for the dull day, there came a frightening declaration of 21 days complete nationwide lockdown.

Day 3:

As the snake dance performed by the markets on Monday continued today, a quarter of my salary washed out for the pleasure of option trading. In other activities, I began reading one more James Hadley Chase novel - 'Come Easy Go Easy'. One notable fact is that I have been so much engaged in my setup since the past 13 years, this whole day idling business doesn't seem to irritate me - at least as of today.

Day 4:


One more uneventful day & many more to come till the 14th of April, hopefully, the last date of lockdown / Self Quarantine. It was pretty exciting at least for the stock traders being the day of the monthly expiry of March series. Its a hell of a thriller until you check the ledger at the end of the day where it turns out to be a tragedy.

Day 5:


The last of the weekdays was spent well with suspense thrillers - online in the stock market & offline with the James Hadley Chase novel. So here is the gloomy evening of the Friday & I am writing this blog as per my new routine of lockdown period.


Day 6:

Today completes one full week of restrictions considering last Sunday's 'Janta Curfew' as an equivalent to lockdown. It's painful even for people like me who have a past experience of staying at home for months. The fear has spread in all the corners of the world, in all the classes of people - a truly once in a century kind of crisis & the very first where almost all humans of the world are trapped in their homes.

Day 7 & 8:

I didn't feel much motivated to write on Sunday so this is being written on Monday. Actually, there's nothing to separate Sunday from Monday as nobody's going anywhere -  neither to the malls nor to their offices. So Sunday was spent mostly in planning about the life after the lockdown on realizing that you only live once. The idea is to hurry up & fulfill all the unaccomplished desires which I have been postponing for so many years, never realizing when I entered the forties.
And Monday was the same thrilling journey as it has been since the past few months. It was a neutral kind of day if you ask whether it was good or bad. Now, the corona infections figure worldwide has reached above 700 thousand & almost 35,000 are killed by the pandemic.

Day 9 / 31st March :

Finally today was the day I got to see the locked-down look of the city thanks to the mandatory financial year closing activities. The journey was too smooth & fast as just a small fraction of the usual traffic is seen on roads. Again there's almost no reason for people to go out as no shops or offices except the essential services are open for business.

Day 10:

Now the routine of lockdown days has started to create boredom somewhere deep down my being. After listing out all the options to pass time, I shuffle their schedule here & there to create variety & make one day look different from the other but the fatigue is there.

Day 11:

So today I got the opportunity to capture the city under lockdown. I have picked up the locations with heavy traffic & lots of activities happening on any normal day, all images taken around 11 in the morning. No words need to be said about the images below as we all everyday experience the rush hour scenario.

Rock star circle

Malhar Point

Chakli (Bird) circle

Racecourse circle 

             

Ambedkar Circle

Inorbit circle

 Fatehgunj circle

Day 13:

There's not much to tell about day 13 but the previous day was a personal record-maker for a long drive to my workplace & back to home totaling about 170 km. The lock-down was working almost perfectly even in the small towns & villages which I passed through. No eatery was open to eat, even the roadside tea-stalls have closed business. The only place with a crowd was a bank where needy people might have gone to collect the government monetary help in view of this crisis.

Day 14:

The fatigue has started to escalate now, the options that helped to pass time in the first 2 weeks have started to lose their edge. So there's a need for new ideas preferably involving outdoor activities. The curve of coronavirus infections around the world is almost peaked out at almost 13 lakh infections & 70,000 casualties.

Day 16:

Yesterday again was a day of tiring bike journey to Tilakwada & back for the task that was left unfinished on Friday. It took about 3 hours of trial & error kind of troubleshooting work to restore the fault in Tilakwada exchange. This Monday was lucky on the trading front also as I made some good gains.

Today was no event day except the trading was pursued in full force and as usual was overdone after the long weekend. In other news, another James Hadley Chase novel 'I hold the four aces' was finished in last week.


Day 20:

The miserable situation seems to continue beyond the 21 days as per the grapevine around social media and also, highly probable looking at the steady rise in infections around the country. The routine is so monotonous that I have skipped last 3 days in this lockdown diary & I actually can't recall much specifics about how I passed through Wednesday to Friday.

To compensate for the totally dull days I have began reading one more thriller by James Hadley Chase - Mission to Sienna.

Day 21 / April 12

This is the third Sunday without a visit to mall or multiplex & is happening first time in past 10-12 years for me. Strangely the idleness & staying home all day doesn't seem to affect my mind & soul as if doing nothing & going nowhere is not at all new for me. Its a shocking revelation, especially as I am about to finish 4 decades of my life.

Day 22/23:

It doesn't matter at all if I call it day 22,23 or 24, all are almost identical except for the few hours spent for online trading. As expected, extension of lockdown up to May 3rd has been announced today, so the war against the invisible enemy continues for further 19 days. The infections have yet not reached alarming level for a country with above 1 billion population but looking at the situation of European countries & then US will make any government think twice before lifting restrictions.

Cast Away - 2019

          The weather on the day of July 31 was actually ominous from the morning but that feeling was there somewhere deep in my soul. The realization finally struck me only when I reached on the border of the home-city late in the evening & found out that whole city is flooded & there's no vehicle to reach home.

         The first sign was my bike which was submerged almost completely under water along with all other vehicles in the parking lot. City buses had stopped services few hours back, auto rickshaws had emptied their gas tanks & all gas stations were closed due to water flooding everywhere.

         So after confirming that there was no way to reach home crossing 9 KM of completely flooded city, I booked a room at the nearest hotel on the highway. Adding to the misery of city, power was cut down in most parts due to water entering power stations. After dinner, I tried but could not sleep whole night due to wet cloths but still got out of bed around 6 in the morning, took a walk outside, had tea at outside shop.

         On realizing that there's deep waters everywhere in the city which will take time to recede, I caught the first bus back to my workplace to stay there. That was not a difficult decision to make as I had to stay few nights at work in the past year & I had all my gear ready there to get me through 2-3 days.