Mohua Das

According to Internet wisdom, the best response to a troll is indifference. But not always. A fortnight ago, a flippant social media post — “I have never ever seen anyone suffering from depression in villages and small cities... people suffer from depression in the big cities and film industries only” — saw mental health experts leap into a thread of discussion on the “medical malinformation” simply to debunk popular misconceptions such as these surrounding mental illness among rural folks.

#BoycottBollywoodDruggies — this insidious hashtag with its implication of a rampant culture of drugs and addiction in Bollywood — made social media jump in outrage on Monday. Barely a day had gone by when #BollywoodDirt picked up the baton. A third hashtag chimed in the next day — #BollyDawoodKilledSSR. A closer examination threw up a few recurring names that start and steer this bloodsport on Twitter, daily. Although a few men do not a movement make, a chat with some of the people behind these handles to understand who they are, why they do this, and how they hold sway over social media.

The pandemic-induced stay-at-home order has tossed people’s schedules out of the window and along with that a good night’s sleep, creating a massive new population of chronic insomniacs. ‘Covid-somnia’ is what physicians and researchers who specialise in sleep disorders call this surge in disrupted or reduced sleep associated with Covid-19.

Turning on a computer isn’t that difficult. Except, if one doesn’t have the power supply to begin with. While the pandemic era is turning out to be the biggest experiment in remote learning, many children didn’t even get on the starting grid, especially those living in the high mountain desert of Ladakh where schools lie scattered across 60,000 sq km without electricity, phone connectivity or roads, and take anywhere from two hours to three days to reach. Now, a project is using abundant sunshine to combat some of the challenges faced by schoolchildren of Ladakh, especially during the lockdown.

When Soumya Sengupta, a zestful 38-year-old looked into the camera and decided to hum ‘Boli o nanadi aar du mutho chaal phele de haritey’ he wasn’t rapping about the proverbial son-in-law but was using the rapid rhythm of this santhali folk tune to demonstrate the life-saving technique of cardiopulmonary resuscitation. “You have to do 100 chest compressions in a minute but if you can’t keep count, pump to the tempo of this song,” he explained, bent over a CPR mannequin in a makeshift set set at home made to look like a classroom.

When Mitali Sathe stepped out of her home in Latur decked in a yellow sari, the mehendi and green glass bangles gave her away. A member of an adolescent girls' protection group spotted the 15-year-old before her marriage to a man four decades her senior. After her elder sister's death, Mitali was the sacrificial bride on offer to the 50-year-old widower: he needed her to care for the children. With the protective shield of a school gone, job loss rampant among daily wagers and reduced surveillance of district machinery currently focused on Covid-19 management, many families in rural areas are stealthily marrying their minor daughters off as a survival strategy.

Sunil Sawale, 59, counts his gains and losses as his eyes scan idols of the elephant-headed, mouse-chauffeured god—in various stages of completion—from a corner of his workshop at the Nandimal Naka of Pen in Raigad. By July, they’re usually ready to file out, but this time, they remain half-done, in-waiting or simply rejected in the backdrop of the Covid outbreak that forced his buyers from nearby towns to faraway countries to drop their orders.

Confidentiality sits at the very heart of the intimate, emotional details that one reveals to their psychotherapist, and the trust that their deepest secrets are safe when confiding, which makes it imperative that a cocoon of strict legal and ethical codes surround the practice and privacy of this talking cure.

Sitting at his Mira Road home, Mohsin Khan tapped his cellphone and out popped on his screen, his gastroenterologist perched in front of his laptop staring down at Khan from a few miles away in south Mumbai. The awkwardness subsided after a minute or two. Following a brief chat, Khan saw his phone transform into a DIY medical tool as the doctor-on-camera guided Khan’s finger to move up, down, poke and prod his own abdomen before sending out a photograph of the prescription.

The coronavirus hasn’t been the only killer in this lockdown. Another fallout of the pandemic has been starvation or the extreme lack of food, witnessed in distressful sights and reports of people in the teeming slums of Kalwa , a distant north central suburb situated between Thane and Mumbra, chafing in hunger and despair.

Three months into the coronavirus outbreak, the country is on the heels of another health crisis — a wave of mental illnesses — showing up at a grand scale on mental health counselling helplines in the form of anxiety, isolation, panic, sleep-disorders, exacerbation of previous mental health concerns and suicide — unseen casualties of this pandemic.

Access to physical and emotional security has always been a struggle for the transgender community, but coronavirus has made it worse. With a majority of them battling poverty, the odds are further stacked up. Apparently fighting to “make ends meet”, a trans person committed suicide at her Malwani residence last week. She is among the hundreds of transgenders across the city locked in their tiny houses with no access to basic supplies, money or family support.

It’s 8.30 in the morning, and Rachita is running late for a video conference. It’s for her son Laksh. He is six. On his first day of remote schooling, Laksh’s eyes lit up when he saw ten of his friends pop up in little boxes across the screen. It took his teacher a bit of practised patience to cajole all of them into staring at a computer screen for the next three hours.

Lying on a hospital bed with tubes running out of him, his cheeks pale under a surgical mask and his movements slow and measured, Shrideep Gawde is a far cry from his younger self from just nine months ago when he was on stage under bright lights, flexing and cramping his striated chest and gargantuan biceps, each muscle bulging on command. But under that muscle mass that took him eight years to construct, he had missed the weak link -- his kidneys.

David Kildendal Nielsen, a 40-year-old bond trader in Denmark was sitting at home when a photograph popped up on his computer screen last June. It was of a young woman with two toddlers by her side. The woman was David’s birth mother, Dhanalakshmi, who is now 68 and works as a cleaner in Chennai, and the other child was his brother that he never knew he had. The six-year-long search by David, born Santhakumar before he was adopted at 16 months from an orphanage by Danish parents, culminated in a meeting a fortnight ago.

Every year the rains unleash a season of fatal snakebites, a neglected tropical disease that is crying for attention. When clouds float in and pelt down as rain, they bring respite from the heatwave, bountiful harvest, floods, traffic snarls — and snakes — emerging from their lairs to hunt and breed. Seeking refuge in dry and cool places or in pursuit of a mate they land in the path of humans resulting in a season of fatal snakebites every year, deaths from which are estimated at close to 50,000 a year in India, the world’s highest.

Green is the new red. At least in the world of academics with more and more schools in the city migrating towards the kinder, gentler hue of the green ink to soften the blow of the angry red, a colour typically associated with “warning, threat or danger” and increasingly seen as psychologically scarring for children.

Alternate sexuality was flamboyantly out of the closet and in the spotlight at a tony nightclub in suburban Mumbai – on the night that queer India was celebrating a year of having reclaimed their sexual rights following the Supreme Court’s quashing of Section 377. While a long line of queer hipsters waited to be granted passage through the velvet ropes, inside on a makeshift podium, men in lingerie and embellished dresses with their crotch concealed and flat-chested women with beards took turns under the spotlight to strut, sing and banter in this extraordinary moment of queer nightlife.

Sujata Sahu and her husband quit their city jobs to set up a foundation that has lit up dark classrooms with solar power, and given tablets to students who didn’t even have a blackboard. Meet the Delhi couple trying to change the face of public education in remote Ladakh.

Accessibility in theatres is largely ignored. But modern cinemas are investing time, tech & training to make radical changes to make people with special needs enjoy movies. Like most teenagers growing up in the ‘70s George Abraham’s favourite film of all times is Sholay. “I’ve seen it at least ten times," he gushes. But it wasn’t until last year that he laughed hysterically when a voice in his ears narrated Jai and Veeru’s tomfoolery while zigzagging through the countryside on a motorbike singing Yeh dosti.