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Omicron
Last Thursday, our daughter K came home with a runny nose. I thought of testing her for covid but put it off. As the evening progressed, she developed high temperature and climbed into our bed for comfort. On Friday morning, she tested positive. Protected by three Pfizer shots, we were negative. We chose to isolate. It would only be a matter of time that prolonged exposure to the highly virulent Omicron would render us positive. We just needed to make sure we were well stocked for a week. Luckily, all of that is possible in 2022. We spent the next ten minutes informing close contacts. For O and me, it…
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the backlog of this new year
Half of January is gone and I am terribly behind with all the promises I made to myself. Most of these are half baked and poorly articulated so it is easy to get around them if the flesh is weak. But what I have stuck to fervently, is the promise of dry January. That promise will be temporarily on hold for a few hours this evening, when I have intended to treat myself to just one drink to celebrate a billion covid-19 doses reaching 144 countries in the world, but that I feel is worth it… So here’s the reason for the backlog: 2022 feels just the same as 2021.…
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Opportunity?
In my last blog, I ranted about how my generation wasn’t quite keeping up and how we wanted to solve today’s problems using yesterday’s solutions, our eyes firmly shut as we live in denial about structural inequalities, offering cutesy cosmetic explanations when we are expected to be bold. To use an allegory, why should one spend enormous resources trying to prop up a tower destined for collapse instead of building one with solid foundations? Yes, I haven’t ended my rant and I don’t think anyone is listening either… Thing is, the pandemic isn’t over. Europe is in the throes of a terrible fifth wave (frankly, I stopped counting). And yet…
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The fault of our generation
Last week, I was invited to participate in a panel on Gender the Youth SDG Summit, UNITE2030. Totally up my street, I thought, as I scribbled my key messages: post 2030, its time for gender equality to be the norm… let’s broaden the narrow focus of gender in SDG 5 to include LGBTIAQ+… this, I can do in my sleep, I thought cockily. What else? Young people are incredible advocates and activists, but it is time to move from activism to influencing policy, so how about making that shift, being part of the democratic process and changing the system from within? Agitate to increase women’s representation in local bodies and…
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Afghanistan – since I had to…
I volunteered to work for the polio programme in Afghanistan in 2008, fresh from my first international assignment in Nigeria. It was only in 2010 that this materialised. I spent half a year with UNICEF working on eradicating polio, a job that came quite naturally to me since I wrote my book, but nothing had prepared me for the complexities that came with working in a country that had only known conflict. At the end of six months, I was weary and weatherbeaten. But Afghanistan was a drug that was hard to shake. So I returned. This time, I transitioned from polio (and public health) to regional integration and from…
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Finding Joy(a)
At three, my little brother was an irresistible cutie. He was playing in a sandpit beside a construction site one hot June afternoon when a little girl joined him. She was called Joya and was looking for friends. Her parents were visiting from Bombay and living in an enormous whitewashed bungalow beside our grandfather’s newly built house in Allahabad. She was a few years older to him and since his conversation skills were limited, he brought her over to meet his older sisters. And since friendships formed quite spontaneously without much profiling those days, we all became friends, accessing open fields and each other’s compounds freely. My grandmother didn’t like…
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Claiming the Earth
Several decades ago, during my first trip to Ladakh, long before Indian tourists “discovered” their own Shangri-la, I met a man perched on a boulder in the midst of the colourful bazaar. He didn’t fit into the boxes I had neatly organised in my head (this was long before I liberated myself from the boxes), so I asked him where he came from. “I am a citizen of the universe,” he said mockingly. I considered him with disdain and wondered if that was indeed the required dress code for someone who wished to inhabit a realm beyond time and space. Today, I may have moved several countries away, but a…