I had submitted this piece of writing to the Ocean Awareness Writing Contest a few months back. Hope you enjoy reading it!

The mother glances fondly at her children, a pod of three slate-grey, white-patterned teenage whales, a smile materializing on her snout. Her smile fades though, as she contemplates their skinny bodies and starved faces. Their eyes are devoid of joy, and any happiness that they had blissfully enjoyed before had simply disappeared like those times had never existed.

Yes, I know what my readers should be anticipating after reading the title of this blog, but right now, during this infernal pandemic, it’s a sin to be positive. It’s a perfect example of situational irony. Unfortunately, I received a harsh dose of this recently☹.

Since 9 am, I am trying to fix my intractable iPad. Every single application that I attempted to open shut down promptly and I was directed back to the home screen. Usually, when apps crash, they will stabilize after I restart the device or free the device storage space. However, this did not seem to be the situation at the present. I thought that I would search for a solution on the Internet. So, I logged into my computer, hurriedly typed my query in Google, and clicked on the website that had the potential solution to unfreeze my iPad. But wait! The website slowed to a near crawl and then became unresponsive. WHAT?! So should I reboot it? Refusing to give up, I opened Google on my mother’s phone, but that did not work as well. The maximum number of tabs were open and those needed to be closed first! My information insufficiency was paralyzing me. Finally, with a cry of impatience, I decided to restart it, hoping it would resolve the problem. At this point, I would like to highlight that a simple solution would have been to ask my parents to deal with the multiple device delinquencies. But I was not even supposed to access my iPad at 9 am to check new notifications in the first place☹.

Climate change has become far more concerning than anyone could have ever anticipated (or maybe everyone anticipated but did not act). Ever since the 1900s, the climate has been on the fritz. Due to our reckless actions disregarding the health of our Earth, the detrimental effects can now be witnessed, one of them being climate change. Melting glaciers and rising sea levels, recurrent floods and typhoons, earthquakes of greater magnitude and frequency are only a few of the effects changes in the climate are causing. Is it just the tip of the iceberg?

March 2020 and before-Everything was super awesome! I was leisurely continuing with my happy-go-lucky life, visiting families and friends, enjoying school , gossiping with friends , inventing new projects, turning playgrounds into battlegrounds, sprinting through shopping malls, gorging enormous burgers, wandering aimlessly but freely, pestering my father to ……….A never ending list of events…..and then everything suddenly turned upside down.

April 2020 and after-The world literally came to a standstill. A lockdown was announced, and I officially gave up all hope of stepping outside ever again. Over the last I year, 3 months and 10 something days{I counted}, the world faced and is still facing a terrible pandemic called…Covid 19!Believe me ! It was the first time I googled the key words such as endemic, pandemic, mortality{scary!}, infection rate, symptoms and weirdly, my mom was also scrolling through the same keywords on her smartphone. If smartphones were humans, they must have absolutely enjoyed this extra attention.