Life, the universe, and everything - these elements, the extremely reductionistic answer to their question by some accounts notwithstanding, can be described in a more “real” sense using some kind of theory up to an extent; calling the collective “complicated” is but a truism. But that’s the world we live in, and sometimes we react to unknowns with even more unknowns.

Enter today: the collective sum of history until some point in 2020 led to a combination of several untractable physical forces, and these further resulted in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic being thrown at our species without us being prepared - and arguably we’re still not prepared enough - but nevertheless, over the months we managed to put some measures in place as if to express a major “fingers crossed” attempt at containing the virus’s spead as far as possible.

Given the general variance in our species, these “measures” have been highly varied across countries, not only politically but also in a temporal sense - and quite expectedly so, going by the elusive nature of the virus and its mutations. And that also means that people’s individual experiences over the past several months have been uniquely bizarre and can be some really interesting sources of historical records for the 2100ers.

In my case, things were more or less uneventful and relatively normal as I was mostly holed up in my apartment, and wasn’t travelling around - but that phase lasted only for a while - come December 2020 and I suddenly had a lot of material to think about and reflect on (and also write about). Long story short, I travelled to India from the Netherlands in the last week of the month to visit my family, having been away for a over year - but because of some last-minute measures put in place by the Indian government I was faced with the requirement of being isolated in a “quarantine hotel” room for at least one week, following which I could go home depending on the results of a COVID PCR test taken by local health authorities.

Today is the last night of my quarantine experience at this hotel and I thought of writing about it for historical records, a la a digital Faxian. I got my PCR test performed earlier today (with all that swabbing around) and also got my result a few hours later, so based on it I am eligible to be “discharged” tomorrow to go home. It’s been a very bizarre period of time, and I’ve never done anything akin to it ever before - in my life I don’t remember ever being confined in one room for seven days without stepping out. In fact, prior to this I’d never even stayed at a hotel in Mumbai before. In general, I’ve never felt so lost temporally (I still can’t believe it’s been a week already since I arrived), and also in a physical sense (at this point it feels as though I’ve lived in this room all my life and it is my personal cave of all knowledge).

It is most certainly an interesting experiment, if you will - I’d never done it before, and it’s quite unlikely I’d want to try it again. I’m still in a state of mind in which I haven’t been able to fully grasp the bizarreness of this situation. It is 04:40 local time and I’m not even able to sleep; jet lag should have faded by now. Every day seems the same. Groundhog day enough!