Pune is home to the largest campus of Infosys, India's most adept representative to the increasingly changing global corporate world which has slowly started to take companies of Indian origin seriously. This statement is meant to stress that Pune has seen much of the good events which ushered since the early part of 1990s which has positioned India in the global map more often than any other city in India. How can miss the adage Pune has own for itself being the "Detroit of the East" and the reason is anybody's guess. Being strategically located to the commercial capital of India also makes the living standard in the city much enviable to the other cities of the country.
I have been associated with Pune city for more than 3 years now and thought myself to be more or less acquitanted with the general behaviour of its inhabitants i.e. humans of Indian origin until who-else than Mr.Swine Flu surprised me.
Now coming to the point, let me throw a light on the big picture which arose on the basis of the events that followed on Mr. Swine Flu's visit to the city and somewhere we were told that our new guest is merciful enough to shake his hands with lot of humans (Indians in this case). Again somewhere down the line, we found that some pre-medicated Indians who shook hands with him lost their hands. Most of them were having light grips based on their age (either being too young or too old) or others had some weaknesses based on their occupation or daily habits. This made us to believe that probably Mr.Swine Flu is an angry chap now and has come here to settle some of the previous scores. We left no stone untouched to pacify the anger of Mr.Swine Flu. Our state governments too took some serious steps for that. It scorned on every establishment which may encourage Mr.Swine Flu to shake hands with the weakened classes of our society who may lose their hands in the process.The targets were schools, private coaching centers, colleges, multiplexes, shopping malls and the list goes on. Then we thought our government may be right atlast this time. We started thinking since some of us are losing their hands while shaking with Mr.Swine Flu why leave an oppurtunity to shake hands at all? We plastered our hands (wore masks ranging from N95,surgical masks and lot more, much of which went to black marketers' stock pile) so that we dont shake hands with anybody at all. Some hospitals were doing checkups for the fingerprints of Mr.Swine Flu on the hands (Testing of blood samples for H1N1 virus) and we thought why not swarm those places. After all who wants to lose his/her hand? We swarmed and in large numbers(Somewhere around 54k people got themseleves checked for H1N1 virus in last week ), showed the power of Indian population. Somewhere our great political leaders were playing their small and cruel games. Our infamous Dahi Handi celebrations got disrupted. Vegetables vendors were told to make an excuse and shut their shutters. How can I forget our TV channels who made it point to show each instance of loss of hands because of Mr. Swine Flu as a BREAKING NEWS!!!
Life came to a halt in this usually full-of-life Pune city. I flew with my mom(All these events were very agonising for her ) to my home town some 1000 miles from Pune. I pray that Mr. Swine Flu leave Pune soon.
ts ausumn ! u write very nice my dear bro...:)
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