The year that was

In 2021, we struggled to figure out if washing hands with soap was enough or was it necessary to use sanitisers, and whether masks had to be worn or not; and if they were to be worn, was it necessary to wear them inside our cars while we were driving or only when we were passengers; and was there a polite way to tell the Uber driver or the person next to us in the Metro that all human beings exhale through their nostrils, and not ears, so the masks should cover their nose, and not dangle stylishly below the chin; and we struggled to understand if one dose of vaccine was enough or not, and if one was not enough, when the second dose hadto be taken, and if two weren’t enough, were three needed, and so on and so forth… and we lost count of when January was over and December came and found it’s about to leave us. In January, India approved its homegrown covid vaccine and cried foul when a few months later foreign governments wouldn’t take Covaxin seriously, wounding national pride. But then a few months later when the WHO director-general saw Prime Minister Narendra Modi walk towards him eagerly and appeared to worry that he might get hugged, notwithstanding social distancing rules, he promptly approved Covaxin, and Indians heaved a sigh of relief and shouted, “Bharat Mata Ki Jai.” At the virtual Davos summit, Prime Minister Modi declared victory over coronavirus. In April, Gujarat became the third state to pass what’s effectively a ban on marriage between consenting adults if they happen to have been born into different religions, to prevent the spread of ‘love jihad,’ a mysterious disease apparently rampant in India, even though nobody had statistics to show how many marriages had taken place by force, and whether the trend was rising or falling, or what ‘love jihad’ meant under the law, as it was a term that no statutory authority had ever defined or described as a problem.