Member-only story
What It’s Like to Code While Trying to Stay Alive
Is a deadline more serious than a pandemic?
I live in Chennai, a major Indian city. If you’ve somehow managed to tune out the news for a month, I’ll tell you what’s happening. We have more than 250,000 new Covid cases per day in India, our medical resources are running out, and our healthcare system is overburdened.
To put it bluntly, shit has hit the fan.
You see, this is drastically different from the first wave. Back then, our precautions worked and we actually had some hope. My family and I had hope even when we got Covid-19 ourselves and spent a miserable couple of weeks trying to survive it together.
And enter 2021, a year that started off with a national automated ringtone — “The new year brings a fresh ray of hope in the form of a Covid-19 vaccine.” If you live in India, I can see a flash of recognition through the screen, because we have heard that ringtone every time we make a phone call. We know the words by heart now, don’t we?
Things were becoming fine, that’s what we thought. Little did we know, weeks later, we would be burying the people we love.
