Home, shanti, home: Exercising ins and outs of isolation

With over three billion people worldwide confined to their homes because of the coronavirus pandemic, home work has acquired a connotation very different from the one associated with one’s classroom years. But necessity — or, in this case, domesticity — is the mother of invention, and people are ensuring that home is not just where the hearth is, but also where the healthy heart is.

So, home-stayers as far afield as China and France have turned an often cramped apartment into an improvised marathon course by running around in circles, literally, to keep fit while remaining in sedentary self-isolation. Social media is abuzz with useful tips on how to convert one’s residence into a fitness centre by using desks and other items of furniture to do press-ups and other exercises.

That being cooped up inside can help develop one’s inner resources, and that the more inner one is the more mentally resourceful one can be, is perhaps best exemplified by the anecdotal provenance of Descartes’ famous ‘I think, therefore I am’ dictum that was to become the stepping stone for modern western rationalism, and which came to him in a ‘dream’ while, serving as a soldier, he shut himself in a room to get away from the cold outside.


In the silence of lockdown, such philosophic musings might prompt the formulation of a new mantra, ‘Home, shanti, home’.