A mental lockdown is what we have been in for a very long time. We are lucky that it has become so evident during the COVID-19 times, getting doubly authenticated in the second surge. No one knows that this would be the last one. No one also knows that COVID-19 would be the last pandemic the governments and people will have to face. Given this harsh situation we are in and the clock ticking, it’s time we understand what a mental lockdown is? It is way beyond locked in Habits. The power of Habit is very well documented by Charles Duhigg and while we feel we are logical and rational, we end up on a totally different trajectory, because of diehard habits. Why are we not able to respond to even existential issues as a nation, communities, agencies, NGOs, think tanks and other well-known support systems.

In a country where thinking is a liability, where getting a job is brilliance, doing the ordinary is celebrated and salary is delivery, where else will end up? Where everybody is overworked and underpaid and one has to keep creating an aura of knowledge, intellect and expertise, when it is so conspicuously missing. Where creating a make believe world is not daredevilry but a pious act of professionalism. For the objective, empirical and the rational this might sound as an anthesis of professionalism, but for the practitioners this is a cult. It is professionalism turned upside down, whatever anybody might call it.

A mental lockdown is mental condition when you are not impacted by whatever you see, hear or experience, a breakdown of cognition and an ultimate faith in a trajectory that does not exist. When mind is conditioned in such a manner, you develop the courage to carry your own locked thought process to any level. You cannot make out the devastating impact it can have or is having on others. For such a person, the future is not what you make for yourself, but what you imagine for yourself. Optimism is a just a flamboyant declaration. In the fast moving complex, technological and now pandemic ridden world, with this mindset, you can only make yourself, the people around, the community et al as a zoo species on the verge of extinction.

The reality of the world is learnt the hard way. Different fields have different methods of teaching their amateurs. There is no shortcut to that. Those who gain expertise in their areas are the ones fit to deliver. Catapulted into overriding powers either by democracy or destiny or by any other well-established short cuts, a state of mental lockdown is likely to afflict them. Though they feel they have come through hard work, heart of heart they know, the mode they have taken to reach where they have. Learning has never been their forte, how can they get into the trade at that late age. Learning trade has not been paying for them. They know the world the way it has delivered to them – the mental lockdown way. They can take us only on that route.

PHYSICAL LOCKDOWNS END, MENTAL LOCKDOWNS DON’T.