It has been more than two years since I last published a post on this blog. The last post is a review of Shashi Tharoor’s Why I am a Hindu, in which he talks about how he was brought up a Hindu and how the faith he practises differs from the bastardised form that the Hindutva types follow.
I find myself utterly dumbfounded to learn that I hardly agree with anything I wrote in this piece. How views change! Sure, I think Hindutva is a poison and not at all anything like Hinduism or at least the more tolerant versions of Hinduism.
But I also think Tharoor is a sanctimonious person who is a politician through-and-through. I no longer think that book is an honest account of a true believer whose faith is being hijacked by the fringe. I am led to believe that he wrote this just so he could differentiate the Hinduism he believes in (probably) from the one BJP believes in.
I have many more reasons to entertain the notion that Tharoor is somebody who, while a person of high intellect, does not really stand for anything he stands for. But I digress.
What I wish to talk about in this post is how I’ve been living under lockdown.
First things first. I got hitched to the most amazing girl ever. I’ve been a married man (saying that still sounds surreal) since January 16. We went for honeymoon in early February in Singapore and on a cruise. That was before all the coronavirus shebang and everything that happened in January and February feels like another life now.
India like many other countries around the world was put under the lockdown to stall the community spread of the novel coronavirus or something of that sort. Things have gotten only worse since then. And if Indian summer cannot kill this virus, nothing can.
Yes, there is a lot of pain and suffering in the world right now and there is undoubtedly much more to come (where is your god now?), but did you hear about the banana cake I made?
This is a joke, but not just that. Everybody has their own coping mechanisms, and baking cake has become one of mine. Well, that and audiobooks and video-games. I will talk about all three briefly.
So far, I have baked a vanilla cake, a chocolate cake, banana cake, mango cake and others I have certainly forgotten. Everybody agrees I am an expert now but only I know there is no limit to what you can learn!
Now, audiobooks. I subscribed to Audible because there was a generous three-month trial period they were giving. I wasn’t instantly hooked and I was unsure whether audiobooks were for me. Turns out, they were. It took a bit of getting used to but now I spend at least a couple of hours listening to audiobooks daily.
But Audible is not just about books. There is other stuff as well. For instance, currently I am listening to a series of lectures by Bob Brier, an Egyptologist, on ancient Egypt. They are his lectures given to his audiences that were presumably simultaneously recorded but they are perfectly fine when listened as just audio. And I have learned a lot from those lectures. I can now write my name — or any name — in hieroglyphs (I showed my wife her name and she seemingly pretended to be impressed.)
They are lucid, informative and utterly absorbing. And Audible is nearly endless source of such lecture series, originals, audiobooks (obviously), and other content that Rs 199 per month seems almost like a steal. Every month you get one free audiobooks of your choosing, no matter what its cost is.
Cakes and audiobooks are great, but it is gaming that’s doing the most in keeping me sane under lockdown. It helps that today’s video-games are absolute works of art with stunning visuals, writing that would put most books to shame (some of the best writing I have seen of late is in games, and I am not at all joking), attention to detail that is almost eerie. Not only today’s games look, sound and play great, if they are based on a real-world setting, they are accurate to the actual thing to an almost ridiculous degree. The last two Assassin’s Creed games are a case in point. Origins recreates the ancient Egypt while Odyssey does the same with — you guessed it — ancient Greece. The worlds inside these games are so close to the real thing that historians, nerds who have probably never played a video-game, went out of their way to praise those who made them.
Games these days are immersive to the point that I lose track of time and often missus has to remind me that I have exhausted the stipulated limit. In AC: Odyssey, I am creating my own Odyssey in which I can use spear, sword, bow-and-arrow, other weapons to anybody in my way. But that’s routine. What I love the most is to roam around the painstakingly built Greece of Peloponnesian War and the Spartans and Athenians are at each other’s throats. I can command a ship, hunt for treasure in remote caves, hunt wolves, and do hundreds of other things I cannot remember right now. The whole experience is less like a video-game and more like actually living in that world.
That’s all folks. How is lockdown treating you?
The Wordslinger 