I never imagined feeling nostalgia about Pandemic times. It’s not the isolation I miss, or the fear of contracting the dreaded disease, or the paralysing feeling of uncertainty that shadowed us every day—not knowing the span of a given lockdown, the inability to work because the market was in a state of crisis because of all the ambiguity, not being able to meet friends or family or even one’s neighbours without a mask on. What I miss was the fact that for most of 2020 and even 2021, the world beyond our domestic lives had also slowed down. If I had to choose between news cycles, I would prefer to go back in time. And yet, there is an irony that I cannot shake off—that death felt so personal and so possible and mass scale. It could so easily have been us, and for so many people during India’s second wave, it was them or family members and we felt rightly horrified by the extent of those deaths. We were angered by the inefficiency of our public officials, the government’s lack of accountability towards its people, and the general callousness because of which the death count raged on. We noted the waves in different countries and the closing of borders that complicated all our lives. We were not indifferent.

That is what lies at the heart of my discomfort around the present news cycle. The glaring indifference towards the precarity of the lives of Palestinian people. It is shocking and horrifying to watch the world continue with its daily business while a particular part of the world has been reduced to rubble, while tiny children are starving and mothers are forced to have C-sections without anaesthesia. I cannot even wrap my head around that last fact. One of my most enduring memories about my adolescence in Mumbai and my time in Delhi is around how quickly aid was organised in the aftermath of disaster—whether natural or man-made. I cannot even imagine what it must be like to go from being borderline self-sufficient to now having to run to grab aid falling from the sky under the threat of being killed for wanting to sate one’s hunger. I am genuinely shocked by the apathy that allows such a reality to exist, where the lives of people are being gambled with, invalidated and regularly dehumanised.