Decluttering during pandemic

Decluttering has been one of the many trending concepts during the pandemic. While most of it has centered around removing the clutter from the house - those unused artifacts gathering layers of dust on them due to limited use all these years, those long forgotten pairs of jeans (and umpteen number of such unused garments) which you always wanted to wear after shedding those extra pounds of oh-so-loyal weight, those books you have so carefully stacked up in your closet and never bothered to use - there's a long list of such items as potential targets for decluttering. Those who prefer a little serious mode of thinking, got into decluttering the mind - cleanse the thoughts, forgive and forget, prioritize positive thoughts, let bygones be bygones and so on.

 

Yours truly got down to a different kind of decluttering - target being the 45,000+ unread mails (or for that matter, the 200,000+ mails) in my Yahoo inbox. While I have developed this habit of not giving a lot of importance to this number, and do not dread missing out on any important mail for the simple reason that if it is important, I will be bluntly reminded of its importance on a phone call. But still, the thought of having a "clean" inbox is too tempting, when people around have been doing all sorts of cleaning and boasting about the same on social media.

 

Having successfully brought down the number of unread mails to ~35,000, I accidentally opened the SPAM folder and, lo and behold, I was mesmerized to see all the unsolicited love and affection showered on me by so many leading brands of the day. I mean it is touching to see five different brands showing their concern for my health by trying to sell me a glucometer, with a 100% cashback. They seem to have somehow figured out that my family medical history and personal eating habits have destined me to acquire one of these. Going one step ahead, there were three others forcing me to avail the 50-80% discount on a full body health checkup - what with all the excessive work I have been clocking for last ten months (unfortunately, the right person, read "the boss", doesn't see that), and the excessive calories Missus has made me consume through the innumerable dishes she has experimented on me during the lockdown. And, as if they came to know about the drop in my fixed take home salary because of the ingenious adjustment and variabilization done by my organization, there are so many remote working job opportunities, assuring me INR 10,000 of extra monthly income just sitting at home. The job sites perhaps got the estimate of variabilization as well as my skills level a bit wrong - I have actually received offers for interesting roles like Entry-level Software Engineer, Insurance Agent, Junior Process Executive, Direct Selling Agent and so on - I swear I have not mentioned any of these skills anywhere on my LinkedIn profile (if that is the source of their "targeted campaigns"). I almost felt like "commenting for better reach" on these mails, but there was no such option available.

 

Similarly, Tata AIG perhaps picked up my 15 years old Facebook feed and hence has been offering me an immediate renewal of my expiring bike insurance policy. FYKI, I last owned a bike in the first half of the last decade, and with the fantastic job being done by the local administration on maintaining the roads, I have no intention of owning one in the near future. And thank God for small mercies that Missus doesn't spy on my SPAM folder - with the number of mails from Kalyan Matrimony and Shaadi.com, giving me a sneak peek into the profiles of brides on their portals - enough to give someone an idea that I am still active on these sites, to stalk or for some voyeuristic pleasures. Another interesting frequent visitor is someone offering me UPSC coaching or a scholarship for a UGC-recognized online BBA degree from Manipal University. They somehow caught hold of my responses in the latest HR Pulse Survey and understood that I am not quite happy with the job I have got after doing my Engineering and MBA, am looking out for alternate career opportunities and am busy reskilling myself, like so many others. Dude, if you are reading this, which I know you are for sure, please note that I have already crossed the eligibility age for UPSC entrance. And more importantly, there is no fun putting these degrees on my LinkedIn profile - I would rather have my Udemy and Coursera certificates up on my profile. That is the pandemic trend, isn't it?

 

In all this mad rush of helping me set my life right, I really appreciate the efforts put by this group of spammers hell bent on selling me a car insurance without any paperwork, or BAJAJ FINSERV asking me to avail a zero documentation personal loan. I respect you for all you are doing to save the environment, by not using paper in conducting your business. Also thanks to "HDFC Life - no reply" for reminding me to be aware of spurious calls and fraudulent offers.

The pandemic post, finally!!

We have finally reached the last month of the year. Needless to say, and for obvious reasons, unlike other years of our lives, this brings a sigh of relief, instead of the usual regret that one more year of our lives is over. But as they say, and perhaps one of the oft repeated statements in such situations, it all depends upon one's perspective.

For the lucky few blessed souls, whose life remained unaffected by the pandemic - no adverse impact on job, little or no impact on income, no fatal infections among near and dear ones, essentials like groceries and basic necessities taken care of - this pandemic brought multiple opportunities to do things they had never done but always wanted to do. Zillions of bytes on the Internet have been taken up by the "thinkers", "innovators", "motivators", "thought leaders", "eternal optimists" or "evangelists", bombarding the lesser mortals on how to make good use of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. But, alas! None of these golden words could enthuse me enough to do one thing that helps "keep my sanity", "defuse my stress", "calm down my nerves", "take a break" or "let my creative juices flow". It finally took this quote from a New York based comedian I read in the newspaper a couple of days back for me to stop procrastinating, put a structure to my random thoughts and make my long pending contribution to the blogosphere:

"We're finally at that point in the pandemic where you can regret how you've spent the pandemic."

- By Molly Brenner

Yes, this quote pushed me to question my seriousness about this hobby, and in a way threatened to ask me the question - "If you could not take out time to pen down a couple of dozen blogs in these six months, are you really serious about this?" Of course, I did not want this to be my regret. Sometimes there are small triggers like these which push you out of your reverie. I have been feeling bad that I have not done justice to this hobby for a long time. But I am happy that I am finally ON it. Well, too early to call it out, but isn't well begin as good as half done?

Ever since the pandemic began, I kept on thinking about picking this up. There were the standard ideas (hate to call them ideas though) to write ... ABCDs of COVID, full form of COVID, lessons to be learnt from the pandemic situation, something about God's way (or nature's way) of giving us a "certain" message and so on. On one hand, as I said, these were not exciting ideas. On the other hand, I wanted to write something different, and these topics were already covered in umpteen number of articles or blogs. And even if I started thinking along these lines just for the heck of it, putting "Appreciate what you have" for the first letter in the alphabet, "Exercise regularly" for the next vowel, "Increase your immunity" for the next or C in COVID for Caring or Compassion was too boring. So many people I know found this the best time "to re-skill" (and upload all those Udemy and Coursera certificates on LinkedIn), "to find the purpose / meaning of one's life" (and share their "having reached a stage right next to nirvana"), "to set the past mistakes right" (and make me feel either I have not committed any mistakes in life, or am too shameless to accept them so as to correct them now), "to equally share household chores / financial planning responsibilities with the spouse" (ain't I already doing enough?), "to reconnect with childhood / school / college friends" (and make me feel so unwanted that nobody suddenly reached out to me or remembered me even during this life-threatening pandemic) or "to rediscover and unleash the hidden artist in me" (and remember asking Mommy dear about the unique scenery I had painted which had the unheard of combination of the rising sun, smoke coming out of a hut's chimney, the mountains, the road and the birds flying in the sky). Finally, I decided to just rant about not finding anything to blog about, and get done with it.

In the meanwhile, there were numerous such occasions, when my ruminations were triggered. A frequent one has been the ephemeral nature of resolutions few people made at the beginning of the pandemic. This is when the initial euphoria had subsided and people realized the change was perhaps not so sustainable. Analyzing the transient nature of these resolutions will take me into the realm of preaching, hence resisting the temptation of using that to write another blog.😈

P.S. Well, it has not been so unexciting.  I did put a few tick marks against certain items of my wish list. To begin with, I always wanted to play "find the word" game with my son. Ask is to find words of three or more letters, in any sequence, out of the letters of a long word, say CONSTANTINOPLE. We were around the 325 word mark at the last count. Another one was solving the Einstein puzzles with my family. Boy it was fun! For once, missus was speechless, and I could successfully confuse her. It was great fun sitting with my son, thinking about the puzzles, eliminating options or justifying a particular selection, all day long, sometimes late into the weekend nights. Simply memorable. Then there was one task challenging myself - for one of the virtual fun meetings, I recorded myself performing the famous steps of the Las Ketchup Asereje song. Hats off to the missus again for the motivation. 😍