diary of a traveler

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 ...

          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...