Day Seventyfour

There is an Internet outage today as a fallout of yesterday’s cyclone. So I am composing this in Word and will copy/paste it in blogger tomorrow.

I have been eager for the lockdown to end for 3 specific reasons:

     1) To get the safety plug replaced in the pressure cooker

     2) To get my hair cut

     3) To get the temporary cap replaced by a permanent one.

The cap fell off today, so item 3 assumed some urgency now.

Hair is still manageable. So item 2 is not that pressing.

Item 1 is interesting. I have begun to appreciate the slow “mindful” cooking of dal and rice. No longer putting them inside the pressure cooker and then losing count of the whistles. Now I stand at the stove and feel the heat. And as I keep stirring the broth, I reflect on the origins of the rice or dal. Who would have grown it and where? How much water would it have consumed? Was it a Rabi or a Kharif crop? How much would the farmer have earned from it? Now that I have time to ruminate. And there are benefits too. I skim of the starch that floats up, and it probably improves the nutrition value.

There is a tussle between the state government and private hospitals now. 4 of them – Bombay, Hinduja, Jaslok and Lilavati – have been served show cause notices for not reserving adequate beds for Covid cases. Private hospitals are attributing it to staffing shortage. The situation is similar in Delhi and the trust deficit between government and private hospitals is growing. If I were to fall sick now, I would rather die at home than be tossed around from hospital to hospital.