As the death toll from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic continues to rise, it’s not easy to find reasons to be cheerful. However, life is not all doom and gloom. The coronavirus lockdown has brought with it a list of side effects – and some of them are surprisingly positive.
Here are ten of the good things to come out of the coronavirus pandemic. A few good things that happened amidst a year of tragedy and chaos :
1.Man transforms old discarded TV sets into ‘tiny houses’ for stray dogs.
Have you ever heard the proverb “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,”? This tale of a man hailing from Assam and his out-of-the-box thinking involving old discarded TV sets perfectly exemplifies the saying. It turns out, Abhijit Dowarah wanted to help the stray dogs in his area and he found a way of doing so by transforming old TV sets into makeshift shelters for the canines.
2. The Good Teacher
A teacher in Chhattisgarh who used his motorcycle to take ‘mohalla’ classes to teach children garnered praise online. Rudra Rana, a government school teacher in Chhattisgarh’s Koriya district, travels on his bike with a blackboard strapped on the vehicle to educate children amid the coronavirus pandemic. Rana said that since schools are closed due to COVID-19 and many children do not have access to online education, he thought of bringing education to their doorstep.
3. Self Help Library
Ngurang Meena set up a free roadside self-help library in Arunachal Pradesh to encourage the love of reading and to provide access to books to those who are unable to develop a reading habit. Thirty-year-old Ngurang Meena decided to set up Arunachal Pradesh’s first roadside library to engage more youth into reading. This novel idea came to fruition when she saw that the state has a wine shop every 100 metres but a library not in sight.
Most children in the state fail to develop reading habits in their growing up years because books are scarce in rural Arunachal.
To reverse this trend, Meena, hailing from Arunachal’s Nirjuli in Papum Pare district has set up a street corner library on August 30 solely by her own efforts
4. Evergreen Grandma
A 90-year-old grandmother from Kerala has won hearts on the Internet with pictures that show her using a laptop to read the news. The woman was identified as Mary Mathews by news website Mashable. Her images have gone viral on social media after being shared on Reddit by her grandson, Arun Thomas. Ms Mathews was born in the 1930s, when laptops did not exist and news was consumed through newspapers and magazines. At the age of 90, she is now learning to use a laptop to read e-newspapers – a feat that has earned her much love and praise from everyone.
5. The Saviour
Sanket Mehta, a doctor suffering from COVID-19, who risked his life by offering his oxygen support to an elderly patient at a crucial time, is now out of danger. While performing his duties at his hometown Surat, he is said to have contracted COVID-19, following which he was hospitalised. However, while admitted in the ICU, Mehta, an anesthetist is said to have offered the oxygen support (that he was dependent on) to an elderly person who was also in need of ventilator support. This act of selflessness to save the 70-year old, had deteriorated his own health condition and led to respiratory failure, after which he was airlifted to a private hospital in Chennai for further treatment.
6. The Pawsitive Couple
Eureka Apta and Joanna Wang got married in Bhubaneswar on September 25 and their wedding treat was received by hundreds of stray dogs after the couple arranged special meals for around 500 dogs in Bhubaneswar. This initiative was conceived in collaboration with an animal care group, Animal Welfare Trust Ekamra. Besides feeding the dogs, the newlywed couple made donations to the trust for an animal shelter that rescues animals in the city.
7. The Miracle On-board Baby
They say one’s life and death are not in our hands. Perhaps it must be true for we cannot ever determine when someone will be born or will leave us forever. But it is always a beautiful news when someone new joins us. This is one such story, but the twist here is that the baby was born in mid-flight! A woman gave birth to a baby boy mid-air on an indigo flight travelling from Delhi to Bangalore on October 7,2020.
8.
2020 was when we were introduced to this husband of the century.
K Srinivasa Gupta installed the life-size statue of his wife who died in a car accident. Dressed in a saree of pink and gold, a middle-aged woman sits on a white sofa. Her husband is seen sitting next to her, his hand around her shoulders. A closer look reveals that the legs of the woman are unmoving. A 57-year-old businessman from Karnataka’s Koppal, K Srinivasa Gupta, installed a silicone statue of his wife at his newly-constructed home.
9. Please Sarapakarice!
It was also the year in which this adorable kid simply wanted you to s̶a̶b̶a̶c̶a̶r̶i̶b̶e̶ ̶s̶a̶r̶a̶c̶a̶r̶i̶b̶e̶ subscribe to his channel. Gone are the days when garnering one million views for epic content on YouTube was a big deal. The coronavirus lockdown has given a boost to even the most mundane videos. The young boy who was trying to make a million views for his video. However, things took an unexpected turn when he tries to pronounce the word ‘subscribe’.
10. Rasode main kaun tha?!
And finally, we were blessed with a gem called Yashraj Mukhate, who gave us “Rasode Mein Kaun Tha” and started the best meme fest of 2020.
The scene, used for the rap video, saw Kokilaben scolding her daughters-in-law Gopi Bahu and Rashi for putting an empty cooker on the gas. Playing with words such as ‘Kaun tha” and ‘Rashi’ along with adding a whole lot of background music, Mukhate hilariously made ‘Kokilaben sing’. So far, the video, on Yashraj Mukhate’s Instagram wall, has managed to bag more than a million views.
