covid19 story 2 paragraph
Answers
Explanation:
COVID-19 pandemic was announced on 11 March 2020 by the World Health Organization, marking a turning point for the public health systems serving the health of constituent populations across the globe. This declaration moment is important for narrative on COVID-19 because it is the point at which it is accepted that the virus is not only travelling to different countries, but is now circulating in those countries. Governments are now required to take action to moderate the impact of the infection, reducing harm for the polity until the virus – through the mutation of its biological properties, human immunity, vaccines or some combination of these – takes its place, we hope, among the many other microbes with which human life has found co-existence.
The WHO declaration is also an important moment for the COVID-19 story because it reveals how data about notifications of diagnosed infection and deaths are used to make decisions and therefore reveals how, in the circumstances of a pandemic, it is keenly apparent that numerical and narrative futures constitute each other.
Answer:
Ideas of freedom and oppression are frequent themes in Bangladeshi-Swedish author Taslima Nasreen’s work. But the lockdown hasn’t had a gagging effect on her. After all, she is no stranger to house arrest, which she has called “solitary confinement”, given that she has been living in exile in New Delhi since 1994, after the publication of her book Lajja led to fatwas calling for her death.
Nasreen also feels that lockdown affected men much more than women. “If anyone’s feeling any restlessness, it must be the men,” she tells The Print. Partly because men are more used to going out, and partly because, as she says, “this is the one time women have chosen to stay at home for our safety, not because men asked us to.”
A woman’s place is in the home, goes the regressive saying, and that is probably why they are far more accustomed to the idea of staying at home, while men are chafing at the restrictions. “Women have always lived in a kind of a lockdown,” Nasreen says, recalling how when she chose to step out of the house to meet her friends, she was deemed to be a “bad girl”.
Mumbai-based writer Shiv Tandan, who has written and directed several plays including A Fistful of Rupees (2019), and is the Founder of Castiko, a problem-solving company for artists, is certainly feeling the chains, metaphorically speaking. He describes himself as the cliched “working out of a café” kind of a writer and dearly misses writing in one. “Working out of different cafés every day, sipping on coffee while enjoying different views — it just gets my creative juices flowing.”
Writers often seem like they work on their own time and at their own pace, so a disrupted routine wouldn’t affect them the way it would someone who works in an office. They can write anywhere, people believe. Em and the Big Hoom author Jerry Pinto, for example, has been able to write while standing in a crowded local bus or sitting on the very edge of the seat in a local train in Mumbai. But for many, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Many are extremely particular about their routines and deadlines, be it a daily word count to hit or what time to eat their meals. Still others have found that the lack of availability of their favourite coffee has thrown their mornings off.
And for others, there are more practical concerns such as going out to find stories and research material.
Also read: Do-it-yourself quarantine movies are here. And Netflix’s Home Stories is leading the way
The importance of going out
Not everything is found a click away. Thorough research requires going through volumes of books and papers. And all these resources are not always available on the internet. For researchers and non-fiction writers, then, the stay-at-home orders meant they had no access to the resources they needed to do their homework, so their projects got stalled.
Elizabeth Kuruvilla, Executive Editor, Ebury Publishing and Vintage Publishing, Penguin Random House India, says, “visiting libraries, conducting interviews or travelling outside of their cities, have practically come to a grinding halt. If this is frustrating, the fact that they can’t plan ahead either is even more so.”
And for some, the lack of meeting new people, discovering new places and living through new experiences has led to a mental wall. Aanchal Malhotra, an oral historian and author of Remnants of a Separation: The History of The Partition Through Material Memory, tells ThePrint that being out and about is extremely crucial to her work. “I really miss being out in the field, interviewing and recording people’s stories. I miss their voice. Field research, it is one of the few things that continually inspires to write more.”
Mental and emotional impact of lockdown
It’s not just how the lockdown has affected one personally, but also the things one reads and hears about how the country is handling the pandemic, the migrant workers’ crisis, the inadequate testing and more. It is mentally and emotionally debilitating to live in fear and that, too, has an effect on one’s writing, especially because writers often depend on what they observe around them.
Screenwriter Atika Chouhan, who has written films like Margarita with a Straw (2014) and Chhapaak (2020), experienced writer’s block at the start of lockdown. “People outside my door were dying in hordes,” she says, “and it seemed obscene and sociopathic to continue to remain ‘productive’ amid the clamour of hunger and death.”
Manasi Subramaniam, Executive Editor & Head of Literary Rights, Penguin Press, Penguin Random House India, says among the writers she’s interacted of late, she’s noticed “a cathartic release of pent-up creativity on the one hand as well as well as the inevitable jitteriness of this moment on the other.”