The Infernal Diurnal Journal

 After a lot of deliberation, I decided to take a road trip to one of the various go-see options around Metro Manila. This was a town called Tagaytay ( pronounced Ta-guy-tie), roughly 65 kms due south of Manila. Home, of course, to the renowned lake Taal- a lake within a volcano, within a lake within a volcano.  Several travel sites compare this to the theme of the movie "inception"- which is stretching things a bit far, if you ask me. However, you were not really expected to know about this lake unless you were some sort of a geography buff. Alternately, you would have had to have read a singular text in secondary school geography class called "Monsoon Asia"- which  I had done, you see. And I vaguely recall coming across this feature at one innocuous 8th grade lecture on some dim and distant rainy tuesday afternoon. Now you could argue that it is really unlikely to remember facts such as these from such a long time ago and I was simply making it up to indulge in a ...

 What I was coming down with was the real mccoy unfortunately. It had taken all of 25 months of artful dodging across UAE, India and 3 trips to Singapore, before I finally tested positive on the ART in an obscure medical center in Makati, Manila. I had to have contracted the infernal germ while in Singapore the previous week. It was one of those Friday's I have so many reasons to forget. After a gruelling week of meetings- ( the worst kind, where you have to do site visits, team dinners, travel in batches to multiple places on the same day and various sessions in conference rooms. This is the first time in more than 2 years we have had this type of week as a fact-face collective- and the location of the proverbial summit happened to be Singapore. On the face of it, that is hardly whine -worthy. In fact the notion of a free chilli crab ingestion at Jumbo Seafood is never to be scoffed at- especially if you are the kind of person who thinks about food a fair bit of the time. However,...

 I arrived at this famed archipelago of the orient exactly a week ago- however my ingress into this land was not as I had imagined it. While traveling in on Philippine Airlines, seated in a middle seat -which was really bad- surrounded by two young and attractive Filipina ladies- which was not so bad, little did I know that the previous weekend, while in Singapore and eating out with some office colleagues at one of the food courts in Marina Bay Sands- I had unwittingly contracted Covid. I had managed all this time and space, without being a victim of this infernal virus and now- when the virus was showing signs of some sort of attenuation at last, I managed to embrace it with open arms. I developed symptoms, that is to say, had a sore throat, mild fever and extreme fatigue and dizziness- but this had not been different than my yearly dance with the flu-and so I had not panicked. But two more days made things worse and then someone at work tipped me that the person I had dinner wit...