I have seen and learnt that desperate times need desperate measures. However, desperate times also bring some good sidekick innovations with them.
The world is utterly distressed, and a bit afraid of the curses of the CoVID-19 pandemic. Humankind was not prepared for this kind of unseen micro-scale enemy, we must agree. The world is fighting against this disaster together, while lockdown and curfew rules remain to be imposed subjected to various amendments as per the regions or countries.
People have lost physical contact but the virtual world has brought them together. Families are gathering on social media and conference calls. Reunions are happening, and I bet they are as memorable as ever. This post is a short one on one such re-union where 're' stands for 'repeated' because the individuals involved were never far and had met often before the pandemic struck.
I know that during this lockdown, all of us, you, me and others have become serious members of different social media groups, WhatsApp being one and the most common among them. Right from 'Class of 2012 (or ____)', 'Humans of Neighbourhood', 'The Musical Attorneys', 'Go For Grocery', 'Office Work-From-Home Association', 'CoVID Avengers', 'Lockdown Pros', 'Lockdown Foodies' to 'Cousins', 'Family', 'Family Except Egoistic Maria', 'Only Husbands', 'Only Wives', 'Kitty Party' and others, we are spending some useful/ useless time on these groups. The 'Good Morning' messages which we had hated earlier, are now our alarms. The insults and leg-pulls are now our pastimes. While people are doing wonderful comical videos, some are recording serious narrations with fewer views. Everyone is having a taste of their self-created karma (...not that right, I guess!).
One of my maternal cousins came up with the idea of creating a WhatsApp group to celebrate online birthdays of some of us, which, unfortunately fell during this lockdown. We call it the 'Goswami Service'. Now, we are a healthy group of of five, ranging from 30 down to 15/16.
Sorry...I mean the ages. Smile!
So, we started with celebrating birthdays of one of us, and after throwing GIFs of cakes and thank you's, and sighing on the misfortune of staying indoors and having China as our neighbour, we realized that we had nothing much to do regularly. So, we started creating topics of discussion like favourite songs, five favourite films, favourite foods and stuffs like these. But, we felt these were non-recurring events: one message was enough to cover the topic. These helped us realize that honesty can be best practised during idleness. Choosing a favourite from a pile of endless favourites is the most difficult task: we realized this.
Then we invented one of the most interesting games, the SCRAMBLE-GAMBLE. The game is not new. You have all seen 10-13 jumbled words forwarded as a message on WhatsApp. What we did was polished the message, and turned it into an interactive game. The rules were pretty simple.
- One person shall post a jumbled word in English, and a valid hint. The others shall try to post the correct answer.
- No scientific names were allowed. Anyway, they would be in Latin.
We were a bit speculative of the implementation of the game. But, we decided to give it a try. We started, and it became a blockbuster exercise for the mind. We are learning new words now. Plus, the younger ones are somehow getting prepared for aptitude tests in a way or the other. We started the game to engage ourselves, but, now the game engages us, and relieves us of the stress.
A few snapshots of the game are shown here.
Example 1:
Example 2:
Example 3:
The 'Goswami Service' thank you for reading this post, and urge you to try this game with your friends. We know you may feel somewhat offbeat to introduce it at the beginning, but, we tell you, if it can bring together individuals from diverse age groups, it can do wonders for your schoolbatch or office time-pass groups.
I dedicate this post to the members of the 'Goswami Service' for whom I stand (just kidding): Man-I, Man-II, Mun, Sum and Tri.
Thank you, and stay safe!
