Tag: quarantine

Rant #123

Quarantined

Last night I went to sleep as a second-year college student whose examination had been cancelled. Today, I woke up in a frenzy feeling like a 6th grade student, who has missed her chemistry zoom meeting among several others, haven’t been responding to several Google Classroom and WhatsApp group messages, have copious amount of pending project work and am overall a complete package of carelessness and ignorance. Never having been in this situation, I gave the feeling a few minutes to settle in. Lo and behold I realise it was Maa, on the phone, desperately trying to get her students to attend the online classes. If these students felt even 1/3rd the panic I did, they better get their proceedings in order and more importantly by the end of the day.

Sadly, students today are cut from a different cloth altogether. The students fail to realise the astronomical amounts of efforts being put in by their teachers to ensure they do not lose out on their academic front. It definitely isn’t easy. Trust me. I, myself took an unreasonable amount of time to figure out all the different teaching tool that teachers were expected to master overnight. Right from the simplest of things like copy-paste to actually conducting daily video classes that require media incorporation from completely different software. And don’t even get me started on the amount of settings that need alteration in Google Quizzes. This is just to put into perspective, how troublesome it must have been for your teachers, some of whom have never even saved a Word document successfully. Please do not make their already bad jobs, worse.

Put up an understanding front if you receive a notice with at least 7 separately identifiable fonts. Understand if you are asked to submit the same assignment thrice. Even in the same format. Also, do not be that irritating individual who personal messages even after all the instructions are posted on the class group. Instead of dialling your teacher at odd hours, dial your comrade. Shoot your repetitive questions to them. Because, trust me, your teacher will always say your calls are welcomed, but please have enough sense and decency to not ring them up for obvious facts. Your teachers are already juggling tremendous amounts of work, you have no idea of. Right from day long seminars to administrative work that has fallen upon them during this catastrophe. If you think college professors, have it any easier, you are wrong my friend. Respect the professor who is diligent enough to take online classes when they could have just been working on their research paper.

Bottom line: Don’t be a prick.

P.S. 123 isn’t a random number. I have actually published 122 posts before this one 🙂

Main roti kyu rehti hu?

Creations of a weird girl, Quarantined

I can make a decent cup of tea. And that’s the only think I can make in a kitchen. I am not exaggerating. I have tried and failed gloriously time and again. I like to think some people are not meant for kitchen chores. And by chores I don’t just mean cooking. It includes a multitude of side activities that go into preparing a dish. If I had my way, I’d make cooking an adventure sport and get it included in the list of 57 official Olympic Games. I am not kidding. Let me put this into perspective to you.

Have you ever tried to make a simple round roti? The amount of multitasking involved in this minor task is mind boggling. Having all the tools and ingredients ready is a mammoth task in itself. Keeping track of whether I have flipped the previous chhapati and getting the next one ready in time is a pain in the ass. And don’t even get me started on the burns I endure during the process. The result is a pappad-like-roti, jisko dekh kar main roti rehti hu. Leave alone a round roti, I am incapable of making even an edible roti.

Why an adventure sport you ask? Have you seen anything being deep fried? All that extremely hot oil ready to just bounce out of the vessel and fall on your uncovered arm. Or worse, your pretty face. Maybe you’ve seen tadka being made (tempering for those unfamiliar with tadka)? That big red chillies going off like a fire cracker in hot bubbling oil in a space vessel. It pops off sometimes, you know. The seeds of the chilli may just land up in your eyeball. I know that’s horrifying but you know it’s true. There is a possibility of it happening and you cannot deny that.

Another case in point, I got burnt by a cheese slice once. Yes, a cheese slice. You might be wondering how that is even possible. But, yours truly managed even this impossible seeming feat. Once I even managed to touch a freaking hot pan and burn myself when I wasn’t even working with it. I was making sandwiches. Till this date I haven’t figured out how I managed this one. Finally to sum up, I once burnt not one, but two entire pappads. Like the entire thing. They were gone. Completely. I annihilated their existence.

So yes, cooking should be the 58th Olympic sporting event. You might disagree, but my burnt roti strongly concurs with that notion.