If you are tending to a COVID-19 patient at home and don’t know where to begin, here are some useful tips. But before that, breathe in and breathe out.

Lockdown 2.0 has opened the floodgates to remnant anxiety from last year. The past year, in spite of the challenges that we were confronted with, we revelled in the novelty of the work-from-home life and the liberty it donned on us to pursue other interests. This time around, it feels like there is no imminent end to misery.

We’ve all heard of Javed Khan, the rickshaw driver who sold his wife’s jewellery to convert his vehicle into a mobile ambulance. Though heartening, these tales of sacrifices make me gloomy. Each one of these positive stories come with the unsaid failure by the state or those in a better position to help.

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.

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”.

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.

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 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.

She’s turning 40 and has turned temperamental, refusing to cooperate. I give her all the TLC and all this isn’t just a ruse to make her mushy. I reminisce about the good ole days when all it took was a kiss on the neck in a dark nightclub to get her going. She is amused but does not change her stance.