Now, its sometime since I sold my car and driving, I thought has slipped off my skill set. And Kerala, with its narrow roads and screaming buses somehow intimidated me.

Yet, when my uncle wanted a lift to the bus stop a good three years earlier in Calicut, he asked me to take out my cousin’s car. ‘It’s not mine no’, I said a bit apprehensive. ‘Ha ha,’ he laughed, ‘the car doesnot know that it not Gopi driving it,’ he said in jest.

I took out car under the watchful eyes of the owner’s father and took this gentleman to the bus stop and returned home, happy at having completed the task.

I wondered at Nandan chetan’s clarity of thought and how I am muddled in confusions which have no standing.

Despite much trepidation I decided to take the car here at Kopparambil, again that of another uncle and applied Nandan chetan’s logic, ‘of course, car does not know that it’s me. And the roads, well, they don’t know either that I come from Bangalore’, ha ha, I laughed to myself.

I had started off to go to Avnissery to visit the family temple but en route decided to head to Chakkamparambil Temple at Ashtamichira, Mala. Once on the road, I was thrilled to bits at the rush of fresh air and the sheer feeling of holding the steering wheel in my own two hands. What a pleasure!

Perhaps, being ‘bekaar’, I was also a bit ‘bebus’ or helpless, I thought to myself. And well, I dropped at my teacher friend, Maya’s beautiful home uninvited.

Of the many things that Maya does, she is a fantastic cook, she loves tailoring, has the most beautiful smile on the planet but most ardently, right at the core of her, she is a dedicated teacher, who enjoys her time in the classroom.

The moment she starts to share about her classroom, her eyes twinkle, her hands wave about in excitement and well, ‘Lekha, we teachers get a lot of love and affection from our students, don’t we, and that is a major missing due to this corona’. ‘Actually it is so acute that it pulls me down sometimes, she smiled a bit sadly flashing her famous dimple.

Petting her lab, Happy, she said, ‘this girl is my best buddy, see, she is so excited to see you!’

I thought of all the teachers who are struggling with the digital screens and sorely missing the human touch, when the world is sneering at them for ‘less workload’ and ‘ease of work’.

Really !!! the teaching community is constantly missing the classroom interaction as much as the students do and like the students themselves, they are itching for the noise in the corridors, in the classrooms and the rush of walking up and down, with the purpose of ‘making lives better’ and the pretext of adding value to lives they touch.

The new normal is rather abnormal, don’t you think?