Coronavirus: It took a virus to show, a man’s place is in the kitchen

It was mid-morning. I was glued to Doordarshan channel, watching the great archer Arjuna, for now all feminine and with red painted lips as Brihannala, teaching delicate dance moves to princess Uttara; and He-Man Bheema come out of a palace kitchen with a ladle in his hand. His wife, erstwhile queen Draupadi, her luxurious hair untied, is waiting with flaming eyes to give him a piece of her mind – this, a scene out of Mahabharat, the mega-hit TV serial of the 90s that airs twice a day to keep ‘We, the locked-down people of India,’ at home. Bheema was stirring the ‘bhojan’ pot nicely, when my phone rang.

It was a close friend from Mumbai -- a man from the media world, who lives all by himself. “Listen, I am trying to make small-onion sambhar, ok? I have kept everything here near the stove, the tomatoes, tamarind & sambhar powder, ready-made, I mean. Just go on telling me the sequence in which I have to put things in? And say it slowly.” My eyes still on master-chef Bheema, I rattled out the recipe to this suave, flamboyant friend, who now sounded like an unsure schoolboy taking down missed class notes.

Ever since the lockdown began on March 24, ‘recipes’ have peaked to an all-time high in online searches. Google Trends showed that both coffee and pani puri witnessed a 120% rise in searches. Uttapam and hummus were first-rankers too, but none more than a Korean coffee that took the world by storm this season, rhyming with Corona –- Dalgona. I am not sure what the big deal is about this milky-sweet frothy coffee since Korean actor Jung Il-woo showed how to make it, but what I am sure of is this: Men have morphed in this Covid phase into cooking-cleaning-chopping (& coconut-scraping) creatures like never before in history. Every woman’s dream! Except, are they?

One friend actually posted a picture of the coconut he had cracked using a hammer, like it was a war trophy, and the ‘eelige maney’ (the centuries-old South Indian iron implement attached to a wooden seat), that he sat down to scrape the hard nut with. Another posted a grand picture of a…roti, and the process of how he had made it round. Two dozen comments commended him on the heroic effort. I laughed out loud reading this to the husband, who unsmilingly looked into my eyes: “Do not overestimate the skill of getting a roti right.”

Well, if you try to keep 130 crore people locked up at home, what else will we do if not talk food all the time? Besides watching Netflix, playing Ludo, and ordering condoms and pregnancy kits apparently, as the media reported. So, have all the dish-washing men and kids left the ladies to put their feet up, twirling hair and colouring their nails? Not if you were to read messages on women’s WhatsApp groups, one of which read: “I want to push my husband & the daughter out of the house. They are nice and all, but getting on my nerves.”

With schools showing no signs of opening, online projects promptly arriving, parents, especially moms, can’t wait to run off to office. Except, most companies are now so much at home with ‘work from home’ that home will be the office even when offices open.

Cranky kids’ shrieks, men slipping on shirts on their boxer pants and women wearing jackets right over their nighties, is all legit on video-conference calls. And then comes WWW: World-wide, Webinar, the new virus that will whack humanity even after Corona goes away. ‘Webinarred’ might be an actual disorder psychiatrists will have to figure a cure for. Remember, you read it here first.

So that’s a gist of how we have held up so far. Vanity took a backseat. Selfies vanished, flashbacks flourished. Someone even came up with Me@20 -- a challenge on social media that asks you to post a picture of you as a 20-year-old, in dewdrop-fresh youth; not of the new-and-now you, when salons and beauty parlours lie sealed, that have left your face and hair with one or more of the fifty shades of grey.