OUR SURROUNDINGS DURING COVID TIMES VS THE OLD NORMAL

When our Prime Minister, Mr Narendra Modi, announced a Janta Curfew on 22 nd March 2020, we all thought that this will last for only a few days, or worst come worst, a few weeks. None of us would have thought that we will have to stay in our houses, locked up, for more than a year. When we realised this thing, most of us looked on the negative side of this. Students had to attend online classes, working people had to work from home, many businesses suffered huge loses and few shut.

But, apart from all this, there was a positive side of the scenario. I remember, I was studying near the window a few days after the first lockdown got imposed and there was pin drop silence all over. I heard sparrows singing after ages. The summers were not that hot and the winters, not that cold.

We even got ample rain in monsoon. Global warming was getting better. All these things showed us that when we were in our houses cribbing about the pandemic, our earth was recovering from the years long pain and suffering that we humans have imposed on it. It was recovering from the pandemic that we humans gave it. Air pollution decreased as very less vehicles were on the road and

trains and aeroplanes weren’t running. The average SPM (suspended particulate matter) significantly dropped by about 36.48% when compared to the pre lockdown period; and a drop of 16.79% was observed from the previous year’s SPM.

In the Pre lockdown period, noise pollution was your true companion wherever you go in the city, but this Covid times has made that better too. As fewer cars are on the road, less is the noise pollution. Festivals, like Diwali, where a lot of crackers are burst, were also spent at home, benefitting the environment. Corona was indeed a virus for humankind, where many people suffered and even died, but it was a true remedy for the planet, making it a slightly better place to live for our future generations.