Review: The Town Slowly Empties Mirrors Changing Realities of Our Modern Existence
On the pandemic and the lockdown, the book goes back and forth between our private and public affairs, the personal and the political, and tries to make sense of the self and the world that it occupies.
Representational image. A cobbler waits for customers at his roadside stall, during complete lockdown on weekends to curb COVID-19 spread, in Lucknow, Saturday, August 8, 2020. Photo: PTI
Inundated by the continuous waves of the (COVID-19) virus, the storm water drains of our everyday (normal) life seem clogged. Forced indoors by this series of major and minor lockdowns, many of us have been reduced to mere spectators of the world around us, a chasm of time (which we ignored before) has opened. The plague year(s), as we may soon end up calling it, has etched the rupture between the home and the world like never before.
With the horrors of the second wave, this Covid lockdown journal acquires a fresh poignancy
Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee’s ‘A Town Slowly Empties’ is a meditation on urban life during the pandemic. Manjunath Kiran / AFP
There is perhaps nothing more personal than the act of writing a journal. It is, after all, one of the few forms of without that don’t carry consequences, where one is not only vivacious and intensely humane but also honest about oneself and the world. But journals can also be something more: texts that offer relief not only to the one writing them but also to those reading the entries.