Spring seeds for the best version of the self

Mother Nature seems to play Twenty20 cricket game in the year 2020. She found it an apt chronological phase to start hitting sixes rampantly. (Of course, it seduced China to fix the game.) We may cry foul, but that doesn’t matter. Foul has no relevance in the art of modern gameship, because we have already flouted all norms and fouled innumerable times. So the guardian angels stand neutral as her ball chases us around the field. All this while, She had been playing test cricket with her silent majesty, with calm demeanor, unperturbed mindfulness and inherent grace. Mankind then kept on getting onto a more and more adrenaline pumping game. They got into 50-50, one-dayer excitement. She still found it digestible somehow. However, the fast and furious kid started challenging her for Twenty20. There she loses her composure as the year strikes 2020 on the calendar. She decides to play Twenty20, racy, fast and furious, with sixes landing in the audience like deadly projectiles. Gone are those elegant ground-strokes to display class and take just one run or no run at all. Even classic defense earned laurels. So the ball turned into grenade and started giving bluish bumps on our heads. The crowd is in a melee now.

Well, the ball is nanometer size. We cry foul that we cannot see it as it lands on our bodies with sadistic glee. But it is Her game, just like we contrived so many to entertain ourselves. We cannot complain now. We have been playing ours. Now it is her turn. The ball is a nanometer monster cutie. It has spikes over it to lock into the play arena of our cells and then keep on rolling to the boundary for sixes and fours. If the immunity fielders can stop it, the player saves the day. If not, the player is clean bowled.

In the ensuing stampede, the game gone haywire, ‘Namaste’ is trending. Professional handshakes, cordial hugs and affectionate peck on cheeks all have been eaten and beaten by Corona for the time being. Humble ‘Namaste’ still stays out of Corona’s reach. Why? Simply because it’s so unassuming and simple to catch the evil bug’s devil eye. It’s so respectful. The virus is yet to breach its age-old rustic defenses. It has got the antibodies of unassuming grace and dignity, which has a hidden power even above the powers of any fee-fawing arrogant gesture.

‘Namaste’ means ‘Namah te’ in Sanskrit, i.e., I bow before you in full respect, taking you as a representative of God, a carrier of His godliness. Here lies the hope for the future. A humbler, less egoistic Homo-sapien is beneficial not just to the planet but to their own species also.

Now, let’s salvage our positives from the Corona chaos. Let us allow this symbolism carried by ‘Namaste’ to turn into substance in our persona. Let’s be more fluid, mellowed and receptive. Fluidity has the soft power of sneaking out of supposed deadlocks by unegoistically circuiting out of many a problem. Boulders of ego merely clog the biggest of mountain passes. Let us be supine. Let’s melt our frigid egos to be more caring, understanding and loving. Let’s bow respectfully and gracefully to the fundamental principles of life, the bedrock of our existence. Let’s worship life and loving with bowed heads. The blades of grass bend down and weather the fierce most of storms. Hardest oaks break and fall down, simply because they don’t bend down. Learn from nature. America, China and all other global power aspirants listening?

Automobiles are rushing to make ventilators. DRDO, instead of pioneering killer missiles, is making medical masks. Millions of migrant workers, who throng cities like an ant-swarm sticks to a jiggery lump, are fleeing away like rats jumping out of a sinking ship. They are ready to risk life and be with their poor families in wretchedly backward countryside, where even death seems more tolerable than the suffocating life in the Corona-infested cities. Celebrities whose one coquettish look can break as well as elate million of hearts are cooking, washing and cleaning—most probably for the first time in their lives—as the domestic helps vanish from the scene. Hasn’t the world come upside down? Sirsasna is good for health even though it comes with lots of practice and a bit of discomfort initially. But it overhauls life and living if you master it. So as we do penance and learn to do a collective Sirsasna, let’s learn it properly and read the message straight. What we have been doing is hardly sustainable. We were going rapidly down the precipice to fall off the cliff. Thank Mother Nature, and China’s maneuvering as an agent of the evil effect that we deserve, there has been a pause, forced though. Errant kids hardly listen to the corrective message straightaway, by the way. Now let’s go back to the kindergarten of the basics of life and forget about the research and post-doc universities for some time. Life has been turned too complex, a quagmire almost. Better to take a by-lane and rest for some time.

Even in the face of grave danger, not all seems lost. Historically, the police has been ill reputed to bruise bums with their sticks. They do it still, but their sticks never appeared more justified in falling over asses as people break the lockdown instructions. However, in penance for one strike on an offending bum, they are doing 1000 pious deeds, while being out there in high risk places. They have surprised me in being so holistically caring. You see a policeman delivering medicine to a differently abled old man; a policeman feeding rasgullah to a patient whose sugar has come down dangerously low; you watch in disbelief as policemen sing songs to entertain people looking bored from their balconies; you giggle with a tinkling in stomach as you see policewomen doing the arti with diyas to embarrass the thick-skinned rascals, the milder versions of full blown criminals penalized by law, who are shameless enough to break the curfew; police personnel cooking food in their own kitchens out of their own pockets and feeding the hungry. The list is endless. I am humbled in the face of this totally new face of policing in India. As we will come out of this dark shade, the entire country will acknowledge this humane face of the police. Moral of the story: a police personnel is the best version of himself or herself as a kind, considerate and helpful officer. So why don’t we have a society where police people are not just half villains forced to tame the full criminals. Let’s have a society where policing is constructive as a helper, the life sustainer, not just warding off the evil. Criminals listening? Mend your ways and allow police to be their best version!

Look at the changed equation! Doctors, nurses and paramedics are the new soldiers fighting lonesome, life-hazardous battles against the invisible enemy in isolation wards. The conventional soldiers with their guns and their patriotic blood boiling to kill and get killed look the worst version of a soldier. These doctors and their staff are the best version of soldiers who put their life in danger to save lives. Let’s have the best version, well respected and valued in terms of rewards and applauds. Once the gloom is over, let’s have soldiers who save, not just kill to ward off most of our virtual and assumed fears.

The highest have been infested and so have been the lowest. People from the royal families have died and so have the poorest of the poor. Lesson: it’s just one little humanity that is bound to suffer in the same ways if things go the wrong away. Let’s re-contrive our economic modules to allow the horizontal spread of benefits and the fruits of economic progress. Let’s transform economic growth into social development. The richest countries are suffering and the poorest are cowering with fear at the impending ill fate. Let the high and mighty draw some lessons out of this catastrophe and rethink about their priority. Let there be some institutionalized grooming of art and aesthetics, not just cold hard logic and reasoning. Emotions and sensitivities are the shock-absorbers against the impending falls born of frigid logic and unforgiving reasoning. Pure reasoning cannot sustain. It can sustain machines not humans as societies. To be logical, we have to stay sensitive also because we are flesh and blood creatures primarily.

In the politically stage-managed communal by-lanes of UP, thelotus of hope and love blooms in unthinkable circumstances. In Bulandshahr, an aged Hindu dies and his family can’t reach for cremation due to the lockdown. The diseased man’s Muslim neighbors perform the Hindu rituals to finish his journey. A group of Hindus manage to avail an ambulance and get a pregnant Muslim woman to hospital to save her life. A Hindu senior cop goes out of his ways to help a pregnant Muslim woman in reaching hospital in time for delivery. She delivers a baby boy. She hasn’t forgotten the act of kindness. She names her son after the cop: Ranvijaya Khan, a human being, half Hindu and Half Muslim in name, a blessed child who will be a living testimony to the triviality of man-created communal identities in the face of challenges that have no discrimination for caste, creed, class, nationality or religion. Hasn’t the antibody of goodness already started debugging the society of its evils? Does Corona stand a chance? Much as there is strife and suffering, but the strains of our best versions do hold the beacon of hope.

As economy crashes across countries, the money diplomacy should be scorned upon, as the new sun smiles once the night of the epidemic is over, especially China’s Yuan diplomacy of enslaving poor countries indirectly through debt trap. They should feel the Dragon’s python grip around their throat and try to avoid a suffocating death. Global peace and security largely depend on China in future. If there is a democratic government in China within a decade, good for the world. If not, God save us then! If there is democracy in China, positive social reforms—especially the position of women—in hardbound Islamic societies, a humbler America, at an ease Europe and an India that isn’t merely in the rat race to compete against the worst to excel, we can lay the foundation for the best version of globe.

As you lie down in self isolation, don’t just fart with boredom in your living rooms or be hyperactive in bedrooms, try to be the best versions of yourself. You have lots of time. The specter of running from the pillar to post isn’t staring down your neck anymore for the time being. You have the most precious commodity as per the modern parameters of human civilization: Time. So welcome all your deep-held softer urges to be creative, to be something more than what the circumstances have forced you into, to be a bit more than you have become. Nurture those little dreams. Use the pause creatively. Learn cooking, read, write, paint, do gardening, rectify haywire gone relationships, let your family see the best version of yourself.

Even your pets will be ecstatic at finding you at home, the entire family dining together, have chat, watching TV. A pet dog Robo in Essex UK went berserk with ecstasy finding the owner family at home: eight wonder, all of them together. He acknowledged it to the core of his innocent heart. Wagged its tail almost the entire day and got a painful sprain in it. He has been prescribed painkillers for a week and its tail tied. Now it has to show its love and affection only through its mellifluous eyes. But I am sure, he will find the pain worth it.

Of course this too will pass. It hardly matters. What matters most is what is left behind. I hope the best version of all and everything will be sowed like winter seeds to sprout during one fine spring!