I usually stay out in college and work the whole day because I won't be able to work at home. I don't have a specific work space at home and also my dadaji restricts me from doing everything.

The Husain family has been experimenting with placing reminder notes at various places in the home to aid the condition of the grandma’s Short Term Memory Loss (STML). Since most other members of the family are at work (from home) through the day, the notes help grandma navigate her activities independently. The New Normal has created new situations and thus, new notes have found space in the home.

81 year old Arvind Gupte runs a small workshop that makes cutting tools. His workshop is in the eastern suburbs of Mumbai. While the unit makes no profit for Arvind, it pays the salaries of three middle-aged employees. During the lockdown, as work dried up and employees stopped coming to work because of lockdown protocols, Mr. Gupte continued to pay the salaries. He went through deep mental trauma that caused a brain stroke that affected his speech. As he started to recover he resumed his activities online of making invoices etc. 

 

One day the internet fluctuated and he climbed on a stool to adjust the cable and fell and broke his spine. He is now recovered from that injury and has restarted his unit after all the necessary precautions. One of the workers who went to his village, found it difficult to find transportation back for a long time and another who stayed at a distance from the unit, found it difficult to commute to work, so stayed away for more than five months.

 

 


Before lock down, my everyday started with going to college in the morning and coming back late at night and jumping over the parapet wall of my home as my grandpa locked the main gate and slept. 

 During the start of the lockdown,

 Lockdown


                                 Crisis


     

     New Domestic Signages

 I felt suffocated 

as I am surrounded with the rules, discipline and controlled by order. I made my own space of working in my room. 

Slowly I started being more patient with the surrounding people and controlled my anger, even the bond between mom and me became stronger. I have also seen many changes in different relationships. 

When the lockdown began, 76 year old Anjali Gupte traveled to Dadar to bring her 83 year old relative, Sarla Pradhan who lives alone in a chawl in Mumbai, home. She was worried about Sarla’s social networks being severed because of the lockdown. She decided to ask Sarla to live with them till the lockdown eased.


Solidarities

Then I also thought of the question of what is family and what is its definition where one gets frustrated to stay together and still calls it a family.

One of the example is of my friend 

where her mother got frustrated and threw her daughter and husband out of the house in order to be alone at home and get silence as there were many fights in the family.


Looking at all this, I felt that why aren't people living together with their family? 

Lockdown,

Animals, Care

Joshi aunty who is in her mid 80’s always sat in her balcony for long hours and waved at passerby neighbours, expected all of them to visit her and chat with her. Just before the pandemic she moved out to her nephew's house as no one else was around to take care of her. The neighbours realised that she ain't coming back anytime soon and so some of them started growing a garden on her balcony grill, suggesting the other neighbours to visit and now take care of her garden!


 

                     Friendships,

Fostering