Happy Birthday Lockdown

Life was going as usual, everything was normal but suddenly a dreadful Virus called the Coronavirus (Covid-19) came into existence in late 2019! The cases kept increasing day by day and finally WHO announced it as a pandemic in the month of March 2020. The strange Virus and the havoc it was causing was the ONLY headline in the news channels across the world!

On March 19th, 2020, our Prime Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi announced that a ‘Junta Curfew’ will be in place on March 22 for 14 hours as India witnessed an increase in the daily cases of Coronavirus. It rang alarm bells! On 24th March 2020 he announced the 21 day lockdown. And everything came to a standstill!

We were all instructed to be at home, schools were closed and we didn’t know what to do. Markets across the world crashed, essential goods in the super markets were difficult to find, and masks and sanitizers vanished from the markets. A strange fear of this virus gripped the whole world and all of us were just talking about just one thing – COVID-19!

We, the students, had the fear of losing out on an entire academic year. Things were so uncertain, we were asking questions to our parents about the future. Our parents obviously didn’t have an answer because the entire world was witnessing such a strange thing after almost a Century!

“Why Lockdown?”was the only question we had in our minds.

We got to know that the reason for the lockdown was to get the infrastructure in place. Countries needed time to prepare to fight back. The virus had caught us off guard.

Though there was fear and uncertainty, that was mitigated by our Prime Minister. We were suggested to do things like “thali bajao” and “candle jalao”. The good thing was that everyone in the country complied and participated in these activities with enthusiasm to keep the morale high during this challenging time.

Our school did the right thing to ensure that the learning continued. They took the first step and moved us all to the Virtual Classrooms from the 22nd of March 2020. That was a super quick response to the pandemic!

Since that day, this became our new normal. Parents & kids, all at home, doing all their daily chores, and attending offices and schools, from within the 4 walls of the house. Now, we are all used to this new way of life. In fact, we are so adept to it, that it feels that our home is our new school now. We are attending all the activities which we do in the school regularly using the online medium. These activities include not only the regular classes, but the extra curricular activities like dance, PE, music, various competitions etc.

One thing that I really miss the most is the offline interactions with my teachers, my classmates, friends and the chit-chats and fun in school. The sad part is that the virus is here to stay. The road ahead might not be easy. We still need to follow all the guidelines to ensure that we are all safe from this dreadful virus.

It’s difficult to imagine that it is already a year since the first lockdowns were announced all over the world.

Happy Birthday Lockdown! But it would be great to have our normal life back. GO Corona! Go!

By-Asmee Agarwal, Class 7A