Edited By- Ananya Khandelwal
“Once this is over, I’m gonna do a reverse quarantine and not go home for 6 weeks,” said everyone ever in the hope that COVID-19 will end soon and all will go back to normal. Well obviously, nothing went back to normal. Instead, every year since 2020, COVID-19 just kept evolving and re-entering our lives in the form of a different mutation, without it ever being limited edition and wreaking havoc everywhere. Undeniably, it affected everyone in the world; innumerable lives were lost, unemployment skyrocketed, the healthcare mechanism crashed terribly, people languished at their homes, mental health issues were at an all-time high, among many other things. All in all, the social and economic disruption caused by the pandemic was unimaginably devastating.
More so, to narrow it down a little, quarantining was the star of the show. As soon as it was revealed that COVID was a contagious disease, the governments of the world had to push people into isolating and quarantining for months to come. Now imagine doing that as a university student who had just gotten to go to campus after a year of not doing so. Imagine getting to campus and finding out that the thing you were trying to avoid has followed you there also, forcing you into isolation once again, highlighting the irony of it all. Here’s how it turned out.
Ashoka has 5 residence halls that stand on campus grounds. One of them, RH5, was converted into a quarantine facility for all of last semester. Every time there was a positive case detected on campus, they were sent straight to RH5 and placed into a room for isolation. The primary contacts of that person were then located and sent for isolation as well. The next day, the contacts would get RTPCRs to confirm whether they were positive or not. And if one of them would test positive, the process would start all over again. It was a vicious loop that lasted for an entire month. At that point, the idea of isolation due to covid and staying in RH5 had become synonymous with each other, and so it turned into a place of terror and sadness. People would dread going there to stay, mostly because it was 7 days of solitary confinement, which simply meant a lot of anxiety, loneliness, procrastination and stagnancy. Along with that, the food wasn’t great, the hygiene in the washrooms was average and an air of confusion and uncertainty was always around.
FOMO was the biggest troublemaker, and if you think about it, one would really empathise because no one likes to be stuck in a room alone while everyone else, including your friends, are having the best time on a pretty campus that even they’re witnessing for the first time. Especially after you’ve been looking forward to it for so long. Consequently, RH5 symbolised a monster, an entity that kept you away from everyone else. But, to find the silver lining, it was also a place of healing because it’s where you would recover and had some time to yourself, for yourself. It was a place for introspection as well as resting, even if it had a desolate environment.
Now, during the current semester, RH5 has been converted back into a normal residence hall for seniors. It’s actually really resourceful and comfortable and functions just like any other RH. But for people who were isolated there last semester, it reminds them of a place that gave them trauma and anxiety and hence no one person has the same sentiments for it. However, this speaks volumes about the impact of COVID and how extensive it can be in terms of influencing living environments as well as people’s attitudes. No one would’ve thought a disease would hold that much power over people but it does and in the many ways that it shows, it’s mostly negative.
On that note, thankfully, things have become slightly more normal now compared to the last two years and COVID- even though it lingers on and exists inconspicuously- doesn’t hold that much power over us anymore. It’s something we’ve learned to live with, letting it not terrorise us anymore. After all, “hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.” – C.S. Lewis.