Caught in a time warp

Vastavikta Bhagat

We at SEA believe that the pandemic has a granularity of meta, non-linear narratives that become useful in making sense of the relational complexities of the pandemic and society. Thus, we set out to collect stories of fears, joys, agilities, fragilities, friendships, networks, collectives, home, work, infrastructures, entrepreneurship, privileges, marginalizations, migrations, desperation, gender, equity, etc. The glossary as a method became useful to reflect on this granularity of experiences and account for slippages during these times. These spatiotemporal stories, when read together or as individual instances produce a new sense of the emergent contemporary. This framework also allows us to speculate on the kind of world we will inhabit once the storm has passed. We draw on multiple readings to bring out the nuances and patterns of social life produced in a pandemic. This we hope would allow us to collectively reflect on the restructured ideas of the self, the collective, society, space, and time. The pandemic bought in a collapse and repetitive nature of time and space where one seemed to have been stuck in a never-ending loop embroiled by monotony.

What is 1 am and what is 1 pm?

What is a Sunday and what is a Monday?

What is even the present?

It feels as if I’m stuck in a never-ending loop and living the same day over and over again for the past 9 months.

There is undoubtedly nothing new, nothing exciting to look forward to. I already know what tomorrow is going to be like.

Am I experiencing time moving too slow or too fast?

Or is it that we all are stuck in the same cycle?

There is no sense of schedule and time feels like it’s being dragged.

Is this how animals feel when they’re caged?

One can only wonder...

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