These days when I hear someone say oxygen, I promptly direct them to Kangana Ranaut’s tweet and suggest they plant a few trees instead.

Sickness and death come to everyone, but the undiluted fear that overcame me after my sister got infected was nothing that I had experienced before. I had never felt the helplessness of looking for hospital beds that didn’t exist, of spending hours making calls to procure a life-giving canister of oxygen. I was prepared to beg, borrow, or steal medicines, not even knowing if they would work.

For the longest of time, my family has tried to cajole me into living closer to home. But I’ve always wanted “freedom”, a life away from my parents. Now as the second wave surges and I battle a fever, I long for their care and their reassuring voice, something my social networks just can’t provide.

In my early 20s, I did the “cool” thing – quit my stable banking job to study film writing. Like many millennials and Gen Z, I just wanted to “follow my passion”. I wish someone had told me the hard truth about chasing dreams.

I was once randomly dumped after six rounds of interviews, which included writing an elaborate test, over a generic text message. Even by modern dating standards that was cruel. Dear hiring executives, how about putting the human in Human Resource management?

It doesn’t matter if we are in the middle of a deadly second wave. Some things don’t change, dear women. If you share your number on social media, even if it’s an SOS for oxygen or an ICU, it’s nothing but an invitation for creepy men to slide into your DMs and say “nice bobs”.

For so long, our anxieties had been at an all-time high. Some of us are clamouring for hospital beds while the rest of us are trying to safeguard our jobs. Earlier this month, I was infected with the coronavirus. Now, cooped up inside taking laboured breaths, my only respite was to write poetry.

Chaitanya Tamhane’s The Disciple, now out on Netflix, is set in the world of Hindustani classical music. The setting is incidental. It just as well could have been a story of athletes, painters, or poets. In this festival hit, Tamhane tells us the story of a young talent who realises with painful slowness that some people are simply not meant for greatness of any kind.

As the second wave continues to batter India, “woke” media organisations and ad agencies are all about well-being and mental health. The problem arises when this performance of empathy does not extend to their employees. Stories of bosses expecting you to work beyond office hours and making one demand after another on WhatsApp groups are all too common.

I knew my grandma for 15 years but there is so much I didn’t know about her. I realised this after reading her favourite novel, Anna Karenina. Why did my very traditional grandma love a book about unfaithfulness, extra-marital affairs, and fractured families? It made me realise that one way to really understand a person is to discuss their favourite books.