Hemanta Panda
The inspiration during the lockdown from Bhagavad Gita had been on preservation
During the Corona Pandemic lockdown from March 2020 to April 2020, I had never seen our home fridge this empty. Ever. This reminded me that I could be the poorest person in the world. The feeling of helplessness is so prevalent. In a world of western consumerism – everything was abundantly acquired and available prior to this disaster. We were over-shopped, overfed and overweight. This lockdown taught everyone the need for preservation and reusability. Especially me.
In Bhagavad Gita Chapter 9 titled “The Most Confidential Knowledge”, text 22 – Lord Krsna says:
ananyas cintayanto mam | ye janah paryupasate ||
tesam nityabhiyuktanam | yoga-ksemam vahamy aham ||
Which means – “But those who worship Me with devotion, meditating on My transcendental form – to them I carry what they lack and preserve what they have”.
Lord Krsna is the greatest preserver. In this lockdown phase of life – preserving, refining and reusing what you have is the key. With shops closed, movements restricted, curfews imposed – how to prolong what we have is the essence. When someone is in crisis, it is very important to look inwards. Soul-searching is the key. In the mad rush of urban lifestyle, we don’t know what we have. That’s why we don’t know what we lack. Unless we don’t know what, we don’t know, we cannot know further. We keep buying infinite stuff which is in different areas of our homes and we don’t know what we have at any point of time.
Necessity is the mother of invention. In these challenging times, everyone is looking for N95 masks, hand sanitizers and disinfectant wipes. Unfortunately, nothing is available in the shopping portals. With the key tenets of preservation, reuse and necessity-based invention, I started looking in the garage about what we have. I found two N95 lawn mowing masks tucked inside a storage box which has hardly been opened for years. Making hand sanitizers is not very difficult. Most homes have Aloe Vera gel, rubbing alcohol and deity perfumes. By mixing these ingredients in the correct proportion as per the experts, there you go. We have indigenous hand sanitizers which we have been using since a month and touchwood we are in great shape so far.
In this age of technology recycling, as soon as you adopt a technology, it’s outdated. The inspiration during the lockdown from Bhagavad Gita had been on preservation. We had two laptops with hard disk drives (HDDs) which were getting to the end of life. The complaints for battery dying sooner and slowness of response were frequently heard. It’s very easy and enticing to toss the laptops on to a recycle bin and get a new one. Had it been some other times when nature is not teaching you these realizations, I would have got few new laptops. But nature is a big leveller. I ordered two solid state drives (SSD) drives from a shopping site and once the SSDs are swapped in, the laptops are as good as new. The swapped-out HDDs become our new network storage drives from the wi-fi router as our new media center.
The unused 24-inch monitor, roku streaming devices, audio boomboxes were lying unused as technology is making us and these items obsolete very fast. The preservation mantra was very much part of our lifestyle now since the COVID-19 phenomenon. Corona virus has taught the whole world the consequences of messing up with the lives of animals and birds. But it surely taught me the significance of preservation.
In 1984 many of us did not have TVs in our homes in Odisha. During this moment of soul-searching, the theme for preservation arose within me. After looking for some interfaces, I ordered an adapter which takes HDMI input from the Roku streaming device and splits the outputs to VGA for the monitor and auxiliary cable for the audio boombox. Now I have a remote-controlled TV purely from unused items. Lockdown is an opportunity to preserve and invent.
In so-called Grand Indian wedding feasts, a lot of food is wasted. In this period of lockdown there are millions of needy people who are unable to get ample nourishment. If we don’t preserve in every step of our way – mother nature will take our fate into her hands.
Unless we learn how to preserve what we have, Lord Krsna as he mentioned in Bhagavad Gita will take the inconvenience to step-out to preserve what we lack. Lord Jagannath is none other than Krsna. When mother nature is teaching us to imbibe the essence of empathy for everyone including animals and birds, self-preservation goes a long way in recognizing mother nature’s virtues.
Would you trouble Lord Jagannath to step out and help us in preserving what we have, if we cannot preserve ourselves? Think about it.
(Hemanta Panda is a Technologist who lives in New Jersey, USA)