I try to hold myself accountable but sometimes, you just have to take a break, you know? Last weekend, I ended up spending some time watching this amazing movie my partner found out about.

It’s a French movie called “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” that won the Best Screenplay award at Cannes in 2019, as well as the Queer Palm award at the festival, the first time a woman director has won the award. While I missed you, it was time well spent.

Anyway, last time I said I was going to have a guest on this episode, and I do! My guest this time is an elementary school teacher in the Miami-Dade school district in Florida. I’m not going to call her N to keep her name from doing the rounds of Internet for eternity. We talked about how distance learning has been during the lockdown, and whether it’s been all bad. She had some powerful points to make about how this pandemic has shown us that we had the means to be efficient in teaching kids, but never really made the effort and the reasons why.

Hi there! How’s everyone holding up? Are you tired of my voice yet?

I have been thinking how much my voice is one of only two or three voices I hear around me anymore. So for the next two episodes, I decided I’d reach out to people who’re experiencing this lockdown differently than me and have conversations with them!

My first guest on this podcast, Mahashweta Goswami, is a masters student in my hometown Silchar. Where is Silchar, you ask? It’s in South Assam, in India’s north East, a town that used to be small but isn’t that small anymore. Over the past two decades, I’ve seen Silchar grow from being a small town with an engineering college to a bustling city and commercial center with a university and several malls and an even burgeoning population.

Full disclosure, she’s also my cousin. Recently, she put up a website with FAQs about COVID-19 where she put up links and information about how the disease spreads and some basic measures to prepare her immediate friends and family about the virus. With all of this information floating around on the web, I had to ask her why she wanted to put up yet another site, and I was curious about what misinformation she’d heard being spread.

Hi there! I decided to skip speaking with you last week. I needed some down time to think, put my thoughts together and I sort of forced myself into getting out of this productivity enforcing loop. I let myself do basically nothing, watch Tv, read some, lay around some and play with my cat. I tried not to read about world for a little bit. And I spent a lot of time thinking. It’s overwhelming, this whole experience. And the information we’ve been getting non-stop. This constant fear of not knowing something important, because information and healthcare and all of the things that keep us alive are now self-serve, it can be very limiting to free thought sometimes.

Day 14, and I am doing ok, hanging in there, hoping, knowing, things will be ok — maybe soon, maybe not, but sometime in the future. Hope you’re all doing well, trying to stay positive, trying to have chats and staying connected with your friends and families, wherever they are.

Today, I want to start a conversation around the two words that have occupied my mind a lot this past week — love and care. Two words that have really defined our individual lives in the past few weeks. We love those we care the most about, and we also want to care for our loved ones when they need us most. Interwoven. Connected. Co-dependent words.