Class of 2020 Lockdown Story: Part 1

B. S. Aishwarya Valli
4 min readAug 5, 2022

--

Many of you had great memories during the remaining days of final year of school or college. Have you ever thought that what if we don’t get these moments due to the pandemic?🤔 Well, it has happened to some people like me. Initially I was bummed about this but there was an alternative way for this. This alternative way was turned out to be a great moment for me.

I have never expected that the remaining days of my final year of college will end in a different way due to the pandemic. So, let’s leap back to the period ⚡⬅ when lockdown was announced.

On March 10th 2020, I went to college as usual. I asked my friends how was the Attukal Pongala [A10-day religious festival celebrated at the Attukal Bhagavathy Temple in Thiruvanathapuram, Kerala. On the 9th day, women prepare a divine food (prasad) made of rice in earthen pots and offer it to the Attukal Amma (Goddess of the Temple).] and they said they had a blast. During free period in the morning, everyone was sharing and eating the prasad. I voraciously had the prasad until my stomach was full 😋.

In afternoon there was no classes at all and we were in the ground for casual walk. I went to the class to drink water. At that time, there was an announcement that the college will be closed for 1 month due to increase in the Covid cases. Everyone was happy about this and expected that we’ll meet after 1 month 😊. Unfortunately this day turned out to be the last day in college which none of us expected it all ☹.

When I was standing in the balcony in my apartment and looking outside was totally placid. Oh, if you want to read about my awesome balcony 👉do check out my blog: https://medium.com/@bsdevi1997/the-story-of-my-humble-balcony-view-a460383ed2a9. All I can see how clear the sky was and lot many birds flying here and there which is really cool.

Well you may ask me how I spend my lockdown days?🤔

As we all know Janata Curfew was started on 22nd March in India. During this time, I decided to participate in many online contests conducted by Kerala IEEE and other colleges and also webinars. I won in some contests 😎. Even there was online classes as well. At the same I had cold🤧 almost everyday due to my allergies and it lasted till April. PM Modi urged people to bang plates and light candles and diya(a small cup-shaped oil lamp made of baked clay) to honor the Covid warriors. Here are the below photos of PM Modi urged us to do:

People clanging utensils on March 22nd 2020 at 5 pm IST.
Lighting Diyas on April 5th 2020 9 pm IST.

One interesting contest I participated was IEEE STEP 2020 conducted by IEEE Kerala Young Professionals. It was one week virtual event which has webinars, team building contests such as making video advertisement for hypothetical product, online treasure hunt, doing publicity for the ad video and presentation about the hypothetical product in front of the judges.

I was in team called Warmongers for this team building contest. My teammates and I had a blast doing all these activities. We came up with the product called ‘Bottle X’ and after brainstorming we came up with all the features of this product. Then created a skit for the ad video and was uploaded it in Youtube. I was in star struck moment when I was saw the video. Now it’s deleted it after the contest. Then we got 4–5 days to do publicity of this video to get more likes, views and comments. It was really exhausting one. Everyone liked our video so much and topped 2nd in this contest 😊.

Then came the presentation of this product. We created a website of this product, wrote content and we practiced it to complete the presentation on time. The judges really loved the presentation and the website. We topped 1st in this contest 😊. So in overall team building contest, my team got 2nd Runner-Up 🥳 . This one week I had a blast and made new friends.

Poster of my team for wining 2nd Runner-Up in team building activities of IEEE STEP 2020 conducted by IEEE.

So, let me pause this story for a while and hope you liked it 😊. Comment below about how you spent your lockdown days. Stay tuned….

--

--

B. S. Aishwarya Valli

Reading books is my hobby. Through this, I started writing articles for Shasthra Snehi (Science Blog). Link : https://shasthrasnehi.com/author/aishwaryavalli/