BENGALURU: I sometimes ponder about how history will look back at this period in our lives. A time when a virus brought the well-oiled machinery of the world economy to a grinding halt. Having watched a number of Hollywood alien movies, I assumed that the countries of the world would put aside their differences and fight the common enemy. I should have known I was expecting too much from our politicians.
They say one must be careful what one wishes for. As a child, I watched flabbergasted as Jim Carrey pranced about the movie, The Mask. It’s a film where an accountant finds a magical mask that gives him superpowers. ‘How wonderful would it be to have a mask’, I thought. Little did I know that many years later, I would be stuck with my own mask. My mask doesn’t have superpowers, but it undoubtedly causes many strange effects.
A mask completely obliterates the relevance of a number of industries. For example, it doesn’t matter if your lips are chapped or not. And unlike the advertisements, nobody really is going to remind you about your chapped lips. Shaving – one of the curses of the modern man – has been rendered completely pointless thanks to masks. Whether you have shiny white teeth, or if there’s thousands of cooling crystals in your toothpaste, is immaterial. Fairness creams –that were intent on taking the phrase ‘tall, dark, and handsome’ and turning it into ‘all fair and random’ – must be at their wits’ ends during the pandemic. In spite of all their razzmatazz, fairness creams have become obsolete in the era of masks.
However, it’s not all hunky dory. The mask has made me acutely conscious of my own breath. It has forced me to brush my teeth thrice, and for longer stretches of time. As a forgetful person, the mask is a new addition to the ‘keys, wallet, phone’ trio that needs to be taken along while stepping out. I wonder if animals have got a whiff of what’s going on with us human beings. A few lions and tigers in the US have tested positive for the virus. A few cases of pets contracting the virus have also surfaced. When I feed the stray dogs near my house, I wonder if they’re curious why human beings suddenly have colourful snouts.
But man is an adaptive creature, and human beings seem to have got comfortable with the idea of masks. Influencers on Instagram have started promoting their own brands of masks. And a businessman in Pune featured in the news for creating a 22-carat gold mask! What the reports didn’t mention was that it was the only mask that doesn’t help in social distancing. Chain-snatchers in Pune must be delirious with the idea of 22-carat mask-snatching. Soap operas have begun featuring masks and PPE kits, proving that one can defeat the virus, but not one’s in-laws!
But herein arises a philosophical question – weren’t we always wearing masks anyway? Weren’t we all going about our lives, pretending to be someone else, shielding from the world who we really are deep within? If Billy Shakespeare were alive today, he would wash his hands with soap for 20 seconds, sit at his desk, and type out these lines onto his laptop – ‘All the world’s an infected place. All the men and women merely wearing masks’.