Corona-seized psyches

Corona has hit the pause button. There are lessons for a simple life and sustainable choices. As we are forced to shed off unnecessary load and survive decently at the sustainable level, we should realize that simplicity, when taken to the limits of perfection, turns the best version of truth. Let us disburden ourselves of the unnecessary gaiety and shine as our normal avatars. The best look I tell you.

The spell of Corona appears almost unrelenting over the media. It’s unimaginable to talk of something else at the moment. The little rocket-man of North Korea sends a tiny missile, a rebuking news-bite. There are reports that he is either no more, in coma or critically ill. A rival to Corona in daredevilry, he hasn’t been seen in public since April 11. People still have time to guess about his status. It shows he definitely has made a mark on the mass psyche outside his iron-curtained fences. If he is no more, he might be replaced by his equally ruthless younger sister. It leaves the story open for many interesting twists.

Against the background of booming big news, little trills of positivity bloom like unseen wild flowers by a solitary forest path. In the Ganges, the national aquatic animal of India, the Gangetic dolphin, has been sighted. A rare sight because the pollution has almost wiped it out. Finally, the credit for cleaning Ganga Ma goes to her smallest in size but the biggest sinning son, Corona! The blue waters of Ganga Maiya do full justice to Her godly status. Corona’s sins get absolved as a clean Ganga Ma flows with reinvigorated spirit to heal humanity. Guys, abandon all your worries now! The majestic stream of Alchemy is smiling now. A forgiving smile! All the pains will be gone. All will come out cleaner. Better days ahead, don’t worry! In Cape Town, penguins are seen cutely modeling in the streets. It’s the time for the birds to turn explorers. In a creek near Mumbai, 150,000 flamingoes make a mammoth statement through their baby pink among a sea of white. Deer roam freely in the empty streets in London suburbs. Kangaroos hop to do reporting for the animal world in the empty streets of Adelaide. Far away in the semi-arid desolation of north India, there is life back in a little puddle. The tiny pool of water stands as the last teardrops of a dying wetland. Till a decade back, the little mossy puddle was a sprawling wetland covering 100 acres. Thousands of migratory birds thronged it. Then the farmers pushed to the corners began eating into it as the pressure on them increased. Now all that remains is a puddle. Forlorn. Wait, all is not as gloomy as we may think! Now a little group of ducks and three storks lands into it. An auspicious sign!!

We fall sick and nature gets cured. Dangerously disproportionate equation! We have turned inversely proportional to everything around. Are we so out of sync with everything around? Let’s get paired a bit to turn directly proportional. Let’s learn to coexist! Let’s learn to be simple in our choices and pursuits. It’s not a stigma to be simple. Just because you choose not to be a rampaging bull it doesn’t mean you are weak. When simplicity reaches perfection, it becomes the best version of truth. Some tea toast for the soul, in case there is still some appetite left after the fun and feasting at the level of body. Cultivate simplicity!

Three piglets, the chum-bums of the so called smaller world around our victorious feet, are busy foraging freely in the dusty alkaline grass and prickly thickets. They have a message for the back-footed humanity:

Chums rubbing bums!

To the hell with social distancing!

That's your problem, not ours!

You guys didn't care,

Our freedom we also don't share,

We enjoy our littered eat,

You stare at yours in loo's seat,

You aren't as neat

as you may think,

Our nose is still pink

despite all the shitty job,

Stenchiest poo is loaded in your knob,

Despite the proof of your evolved brain,

All appears to go down the drain!

Dozens of kilometers away, the mall is silent in the desolate city under Corona seize. The escalator works to hear its own echo instead of the jostling crowd. A sparrow is enjoying the ride as it moves up perched on the side support. It flies back to start the ride again from the foot of the staircase. Now she also gets her share of the escalator ride! Its joy born of the ride is palatable. As we lock up, nature opens! Please don't miss the fact that all and sundry except we humans appear so-so happy after many decades! In pure natural terms, we are currently like parents who sacrifice their comfort to bring a smile on the faces of their children. Don't sulk over the lockdown. Feel proud like a parent who has invested her own happiness and joy to make her daughter happier and healthier! We should feel like proud mama and papa to the rest of the species!

Well, the boss has survived and joined his wartime duties. Boris Johnson has luckily recovered from Corona infection. Corona must be disappointed over not being able to claim a big wicket. But we are happy for our species. With energy graph on the upcurve, the UK parliament holds a virtual session through video conferencing. Are we heading in a direction when everything will turn virtual? On the other continent, a funny scene gets played. The Brazilian President, coughing like another Corona victim, gets onto the protesting stage, no mask, no social distancing. They are feeling more scared of the lockdown than Corona. Hope, Boris Johnson, having tasted the bug, and realized the importance of precautions, must write a letter to the Brazilian gallant and give him some sanity talk. These leaders can get in personal touch with PM Modi, who has been chosen as the number one commander in the fight against Corona. He definitely can pass over a few workable tips to them. The recovery rate in India is around 23.5, highest in the world. Spread has been tamed to a linear trajectory instead of an exponential one, thus proving the Indian PM’s credentials. These stats acquire more significance on account of the fact that India surpasses the populations of all the major sufferers summed up together. More importantly, the majority of the population is prone to hooliganism with deep-rooted fissures in the society, making it the toughest job to keep them under the leash. Immanuel Macron must be thinking of keeping social distancing even from water. Corona has been found in the Seine river flowing throwing the French capital. Some zoo animals have been tested positive and a few cats have also tasted it. Either Corona is trying its level best to hide in non-human bodies, sensing the urgency of human war against it, or it is creating a hysteric atmosphere by setting up pickets everywhere.

We have got habituated to show distrust. It’s a mundane effect of our not so ordinary pursuits. It breeds unsparing competition. We are more prone to be scared by instincts than even our cave-dwelling ancestors. When people get quarantined, they pour out their reaction according to their fears. Some have suffered communal anxiety attacks and view steps to the quarantine centers as if they are being dragged to gas chambers. There have been attacks on health officials. The government has now made the attack on health workers a criminal non-bailable offence with imprisonment up to 7 years. On a positive note, Maulana Sad of the Tabligi Jamaat ill-fame has turned a lamb and is issuing audios, appealing his followers to cooperate with governmental measures against the pandemic. All wars of passions, including religious ones, have economic interests at their core. When the enforcement directorate started to smell out his massive properties spread over farmhouses and buildings, the Maulana got scared and now turns an approver of administrative measures to contain Corona. Isn’t economy the sole driving force behind all pushing and pulling happening over the globe?

Pakistani Maulanas are throwing trickier googlies than Corona itself. Here comes a still unnamed delivery that can stump off any sane mind. A high-ranking revered Maulana says that Corona has struck Pakistan because the women and girls in the Islamic republic are falling into immoral and immodest ways. The ever obedient to clergy Pakistani PM, a product of ultra-modern Western flamboyance and free fun himself, listens like a student and adds a geostrategic catalyst to the Maulana’s chemical analysis of the Corona. Imran Khan says all this immoral effect on the Islamic society in Pakistan is born of the Indian film industry, Bollywood. Well, what to say?! Someone comes out of a coal mine and laughs at the Taj Mahal for little bits of pollution effects on its gleaming white body.  

Everything is in a flux and will remain so till there is a vaccine and Corona gets tamed. The HCQ, the anti-malarial drug, hailed by many as the wonder drug/weapon against the stealthy enemy, is now put under suspicion. It adversely affects the patient’s heart, they say. In any case, India is benevolently producing a huge stock to help humanity and is in fact sending it to at least 50 countries. Pakistan won’t have our wonder drug! People won’t forgive the government if it takes the humanistic credo too far. The battle is too volatile by the way. The heroes fall easily and may turn villain.

Iran has suffered terribly at the hands of Corona. They hardly have the health infrastructure to cope up with such medical emergencies. They but love military posturing and imagined threats in future are more realistic than the threat on the door-step, simply because it pampers the egos of those in power, which in turn creates the reason for misuse of power by depriving the populace of the basic amenities of life. The health of common Iranian is too common of a subject. There are bigger battles against bigger enemies. So they have launched a military satellite. The entire humanity would have been indebted to them if Iranian scientists had made some vaccine against Corona. If you do that, you won’t need military satellite to watch over your interests, the love and sympathy of millions outside Iran would be sufficient to ward off most of the dangers.  

A lot much flimsy etiquette, both from the nearest ones to the casual acquaintances around, under testing conditions, simply vanish like last drops of water vanish under the fiery June sun in north Indian summers. Relations fall apart. Is the instinct of individual self preservation so overpowering to even peel off the outer layers of our identity, even our family or relations? Corona has acquired the cult status of a demon in Hindu mythology. Masses in India behave at the extreme ends, no mid-way sensible, considerate action. Either they won’t listen to anyone; no voice of sanity reaching their ear-wax stuffed ears. They would just throng around to break all prohibitory orders. They do it as long as they aren’t scared in the absence of sufficient realization and knowledge of the issue. But God forbid if the panic strikes. Then all reason gets trampled under the stampede. Rumors do the rounds. People rush and do any kind of skullduggery to get out of the Corona juggernaut. From adamant rams to panicked bleating sheep, the journey is too swift to plan anything, In MP, a panic stricken family says no to cremate their diseased family member. Death has been overtaken by something more maligned, Corona. The Tehsildar takes the responsibility to fulfill the last rites. The burly middle aged official has taken the boundary of his duties into a zone of humanistic sensitivities, which was thoroughly missing in pre-Corona administration. It was almost dehumanized and functioned matter of factly. This definitely is a welcome change.

In Ambala, Haryana, villagers, including women, are fighting stone throwing foul-mouthed pitched battles with the police. The district administration has chosen this particular cremation yard as the crematorium site for the Corona victims. The diseased is an 86 year old womanwho doesn’t belong to the village. The municipal workers are clothed in PPEs and appear like they are visiting a nuclear blast site. The rampaging villagers are scared for their dead also. I hope they don’t fear that the virus being burnt on the pyre along with the body gets into the spirit world to haunt their ancestors. Well, looking at the bloodied battle it appears so.  

Communist China has created a crisis for the democracies across the world as nations are forced to lockdown. What we are facing now as emergency measures are simply the routine norms in Communist China. China spreads the disease and now sells medical supplies. In the crashed economic scenario, it’s wagging its tail to take over as many companies as possible. It’s pumping money into the WHO to usurp world leadership. No wonder WHO has literally changed into CHO. The WHO/CHO has taken a jibe at India also. In their recent online publication, they show Ladhak as part of China. Do you need more proofs to show who owns WHO? People say and believe it with full conviction that China-Russia-Pakistan are ganging up to forge a new axis of evil. The WW 3 axis of negative power is spreading fake news, the disinformation campaign through fake accounts, the infodemic, a new bomb. Fake cures, false claims create panic, uncertainty and anxiety. One such offering is the cure in the form of drinking bleach. It can kill the virus, the volley from infodemic claims. But Trump seems to have trumped all and sundry with his miraculous cure. He expertly muses, ‘We can inject disinfectants into the body to kill the virus!’ The virus must have been taken aback by the war strategy, but more aback were the disinfectant makers. They rushed to put up a public declaration against it, saying their products are hazardous if consumed internally. But loyalists will be loyalists, by that time already a few dozen people had carried out the experiment. Trump also puts sun into a quandary by suggesting that sunlight can be somehow put inside to take the virus unawares.

Pakistan the crony! China wants to show to the world that they are like any other sufferer against the virus. They are now carefully structuring and manufacturing pockets of virus spread in select areas to be seen as fellow sufferers of the pandemic, in order to avoid being seen completely safe and out of it. They may have the vaccine also, but they have to show a typical research methodology to convince the world that all this was done under the necessities created in circumstances post-epidemic and there is nothing like preplanning involved in all this. Pakistan has offered its citizens to be used as guinea pigs for clinical trials for any prospective drug. Possibly they do this favor to waive off some of the unpayable loans that are loaded on its poor head by China. High time the world thinks in terms of democracy in China. As HH Dalai Lama says, “A democratic China is not only in the interest of the world but Chinese people as well.” If democracy can kill one, a communist autocracy can easily wipe out hundred at least in the same circumstances. So choose democracy.

South Africa deploys 70,000 troops to enforce lockdown. They realize what havoc it can wreak in Africa. We can merely pray that Corona doesn’t spread in Africa, otherwise the losses occurred in other continents will appear like celebratory firework in comparison to a massive cannon ball strike.

The people run away as the reconnoitering drones approach to watch over the curfew infringement, PM Modi emerges as the top commander in the war. By clamping down with iron grip on the entire areas where the super-spreaders have been found, India has been successful in keeping the graph linear instead of exponential growth.

Corona has far more consequences in a complex society like India. In a village, a milkman who supplied to many clients is found infected along with his family. They have been quarantined. The buffalos have nowhere to go. Nobody would touch them. In normal times people would hold a buffalo dearer than a lump of gold, but not now. They are from a Corona-carrier family. While boarding the ambulance, the distraught milkman untethered the cattle and set them free.

In a tiny colony of small time wage earners, laborers and masons, some harvest reapers arrive from Karnal. One of the newcomers is found infected. The entire locality has to be cordoned off. Now a policeman accompanies them even when they go out to harvest wheat. It’s so intimidating they say. However, on a positive note, drunkards no longer do their shouting, blabbering rounds in the streets. They look sober. More importantly, Modi emphasizes self-sufficient village economies, Gandhi’s gram swaraj. Timeless are the principles of such great people.

As people rhyme Corona and China in the same vein, leaving a fretting China admonishing Australia for recommending international probe into the genesis of the virus, Arnab Mukherjee has got a diversion. He is shouting Sonia, Sonia. On the way to this office, his car appears to have been vandalized by some miscreants. He squarely blames Sonia for this attempt on his life. Now Arnab being Arnab, you can be sure of his reaction. His lung power is immaculate. This is no virtual studio war, this is something real, so you can count upon his great show. Beyond Arnab’s storms in the tea-cups, quarantined laborers are whitewashing the school serving as their shelter facility. Hard-pressed by the war of survival during normal times, they hardly get time to think beyond themselves. Now with enforced leisure time they come out of the narrow confines of self preservation and contribute to a greater cause. Evolution of their self, I would call it.

In a world of no sports, no movies, no junk food, where all are just on the basics of life, the sediment load always in a flux now settles down to help us see things with a bit more clarity. We get an opportunity to see how many things that we load ourselves with are in fact redundant; we can very easily survive without them. That extraordinary is simply a mundane fruit of self-love. Self-love in turn is just a little prayer to the soul inside. And soul is merely a spark of the all encompassing love showering its meteorite showers across the cosmos.  

   

    

Where the mind is without fear!

Osho tells a beautiful story about fear. A Yogi following the path of fearlessness set up his hut high in the mountains. In deep forests and complete isolation he did his tapasya. His fame started trickling down the hills like rainwater did through the ravines. People accepted him as a siddha because he was no longer afraid of wild animals and inclement weather elements. A young man wanting to follow the same path reached him for diksha. They were talking and a big lion roared nearby. The young man began shivering with fear. The Yogi laughed and said you have too much fear in you, making you almost ineligible for the path. The young man accepted his fear openly. After some time, the master got up and went inside the cave to do something. The young man wrote a few holy hymns on the rock the holy man was sitting on. On returning, as he was about to step onto the rock, the Yogi’s foot shook with horror. He was within a fraction of a second to commit blasphemy by stepping on a holy hymn. He was terrified. Now the young man roared with laughter. You are as fearful as me, just that your objects of fear are virtual, mine are at least real.

Most of us believe that fearlessness is in direct proportion to one’s spiritual evolution. We believe that the obsession with self preservation plummets down in proportion to the rise in awareness. Little do we realize that for one gram of real physical fears shed from our being, we nurture and add kilograms of virtual fears, the fears of religion, of blind conventions, institutionalized faith, of our image that we have built and the consequent fear to maintain it. Physical threat born fears are ingrained in our biology; psychological fears are what we have built up in the citadels of our minds.

We are scared of snakes. Our forefathers must have been bitten fatally in the forests. We have this collective paranoid fear of snakes, so much so that we even forget that 90% of them are non-venomous to humans. But then to us the word snake strikes as a collective noun, a symbol of all our real and assumed fears. It doesn’t matter if it is a Kobra or a little harmless worm that can hardly do any damage to the human system. Yes caution regarding snakes is one thing, but paranoid fear of them is totally another. Not many of us have been exposed to a life threatening situation against a snake, still the sight of a snake, from the cutest to the most lethal, triggers the same chemicals of plain, unadulterated fear into our system. Simply because up and down the ladder of our evolution we have added to the virtual fears regarding them.

A common wolf snake is a little snake that feeds on skinks and other little prays found near homes, so the poor little thing sneaks into houses as well during its reptilian feasting. Its reptilian status makes it lethal not its feeble venom. It has vibrant soft pink color and artistic white patterns, making it look like a scarily mischievous foot-soldier in the slithery army. People take these bands as a mark of fatal venom. ‘The smaller and shinier, the more venomous it is!’ they exclaim with raw fear. Like I also did last year as I rushed to my mother’s fearful call as she stared at the little thing in her room. We humans have set up our own norms of what is sinful and what is not. Among them is the principle that one is entitled to kill a snake if it enters our house. I won’t be too judgmental about it. All I can say is that we can look for alternatives before condemning it to death. There are always options provided we use our basic human faculty, i.e., reflect a bit before instinctively reacting.

I had hardly any knowledge of the little common wolf, so scared to the guts, believing it to be a life threatening creature, the symbol of my virtual fears born of my ignorance about its reality, I killed it. I had little clue to any other option. The act was my cowardly reaction  pushed by my virtual fears and ignorance of the reality about the little reptile. The house is in a village and you don’t have any snake catchers even in the nearest town. Pained by my reactive deed, and still more by my inability to respond in any other way, I searched for information about this type of snake. The dispelling of my ignorance caused me repentance. I stood guilty in my own eyes. My virtual fears bred by my ignorance and nourished by collective fearful hysteria about a reptile created a life threatening situation where there wasn’t any. Aren’t most of our fears, anxieties and insecurities the phantoms doing rounds in the darkness of ignorance?

My realization came to be tested this morning. ‘Saanp saanp!’ my sister is hysteric with fear. She has broom in her hand, but a broom can scare a husband, not a snake. Indian women feel empowered with a broom in their hands, as if it is a sword, against their husbands. But the weapon fails them against mice and little snakes.

Let knowledge be your tool, at least to the wise ones. I see the beautiful common wolf snake slithering on the verandah floor, creeping to test my realization. Yes, it looks scary. It’s agile. It has a tiny hood. Its patterns are something that gives jitters with a scary sensation. It cannot kill humans with its venom. It is just enough for skinks. But it can scare humans like any other snake. We are always on a tinderbox to give a blast to our fears. On top of that it glides sideways like a rattle snake. My knowledge about it stops me from repeating my cowardly act last time. I have the knowledge that it cannot kill me. Still my biological system has triggered the panic hormones through the system. It cannot overcome decades of systematic breeding of virtual fears. The body reacts one way, but my mind is alert. I decide to take the best option. I pick up the little one feet fire-tong and decide to give it a chance at life. My hands are shaking, a raw primordial fear of the reptile. My mind but surefooted with the knowledge that its venom won’t kill me, but all along this even my mind has a strain of doubt about my knowledge about the fact about the common wolf snakes. Of that later!

The rawness of nature! When two scared to the guts creatures decide to come on the negotiating table you can expect goof ups. I fumble. I am scared. It is even more scared. I have at least chance at life. It thinks that it is under mortal threat. Its tiny hood is doing all it takes to ward off the threat. It slithers like a rattle snake. So fast and agile! The heaves at life! God knows why there is so much of attachment to the body across all the species! On top of that my instrument is really short and I cannot afford to catch it from anywhere down its body leaving its little hood with spared length to bite my hand. Even a fake bite by a harmless snake is lethal, because our fears are real. I have to catch it a bit below its hood to give a best option to both the parties. My writer’s hands shake and let it slip many times. Whenever it falls, I jump like a trail of firecrackers has been tucked at my tailbone. My sister is warning all this while that it will sneak inside. Her solution is the stick waiting in the corner. Finally, my knowledge and awareness overcomes my pure biological reaction and the phantoms of virtual fears. It’s caught decently and I take it outside to let it glide into the marijuana plants that have strangely thronged at every nook corner this year. ‘I will use the stick if it comes in again!’ I have to appease my sister also.

Now coming to my nagging suspicion all this while in my mind even with the facts about the common wolf snakes. A few years back, a young man took fancy to catch snakes. He would do it expertly and hold them by tails as they fled for life. One day he was fully drunk and decided to make a little entertaining show of it. It was a common wolf snake I am more or less sure. Well, he caught it and in high spirits decided to go around the village showcasing his catch. Almost sloshed in country liqueur, he tried to put it inside a little bottle, succeeded also, but not before the little thing did what it is supposed to do under these circumstances. The gallant young man ignored the bite of this little worm type snake and died next day. Well, scientifically the venom of a little common wolf snake might not kill a human being in normal circumstances. But then biological accidents are always beyond the understanding of medical science also. Possibly this country-made alcohol and the apparently little bite by a little snake concocted something lethal to kill him. Now this fact was nagging me all the while. Knowledge liberates, it enslaves also. It opens, it shuts the door also. Main thing is how much we balance. The door cannot be either completely open or totally shut off. I would term his deed a foolish one, not an act of fearlessness. Fear within the limits of practical caution is a convenience, beyond that it turns into either foolishness or crippling bondage of paranoid virtual slavery to apprehensions, insecurity and assumptions.

Some reflections

The PM talked from heart on his radio show Man ki Baat on Akshay Tritya. People really look forward to listening to him. He has proven his administrative capacities like a kind, considerate and wise patriarch of the family. In normal times, people bought gold on this occasion. Most of the festivals are symbolic of a larger reality that unfortunately lies hidden. Thus all we have is bland repetition. Buying of gold isn’t possible, but one can buy gold of the soul through selfless contribution to the PM Covid fund to help the poor. India usually is a massive thoroughfare of millions of small time hawkers and vendors operating through hand pulled carts, little temporary shelters, on pavements and many more tiniest means. They are gone. They dig a well daily to earn a living. They are the ones who are suffering for want of goods. The rest are suffering in mind basically because they have the food, shelter and clothing without any problem. High time that we start celebrating festivals in spirit now instead of just in letter through rot repetition of rituals. I expect the Indian society to become a kind and considerate one after the shadows of Covid 19 get dispelled from the stage of life and we emerge again to start playing our suspended innings awain. I hope all of us will be better players.    

A lime butterfly is braving hot dusty gusts of wind. A swirling, flirtatious little flying flower, challenging hot summers through its subtle feminine power of colors and fragrance. It seems like the long dead spring’s echo, a sentinel of colors, a dancing ounce of celestial beauty. There are flowers still, in all this baking it. All of them hold fort from the side of the spring. Dandelion garden weeds creep and smile from tiniest opportunities—mother earth’s blooming heart looking for any tiny nook corner to bloom—and hold forth the little sentry posts of wilderness even in man-managed gardens. A little story blossoms in a day. The tiny yellow flowers bloom in the morning and by the time sun reaches overhead, they are grey-headed old men with fluffy silvery parachute like seed-heads ready to go swirling in air for the propagation of free spirits and relaxing wilderness. A red-vented bulbul is taking luscious bites at duranta berries. They are poisonous for we humans, but may be they are good for them, otherwise they won’t touch them. They don’t eat out of gluttony or just curiosity. They simply eat what is eatable. A honeybee is busy on the buffet table of a creamy white guava blossom, the tiny little winged angel playing its part in a bigger process: nectar for herself, fruit for us and seeds for the tree. In the jasmine leaves, a cute oriental white eye is prying a swab of spider webs to use it as the building material for her little nest cup. All seems normal and routinely safe. We but have bigger problems, the creations of our mind-work. Our creation has gone too complex. Either we stop expecting the age old joy and live as a mechanical adaptation to what we have created, or we shift the fundaments of our life in sync with larger forces of nature.

Despite all the mayhem, to the tune of a third world war, mother nature appears to give a subtle message: Lockdown isn’t a total loss altogether; one can open another frontier of spirit where Corona cannot reach. One can go within to be a better version. All adversities have the hidden fruits of opportunities among the visible thorns and thickets. We have to salvage ours, but not by going out, rather by going into the house and then still inside, the inner journey. Once we establish that rapport with the self, we have a better chance of becoming makers instead of spoilers.

The Covid-19 cases in India are around 27000 with 900 deaths so far. We haven’t done enough testing to make Corona statistically gleeful, the critics may say. To make it more worrisome, ICMR says that 80 percent of the cases are asymptomatic, that is, the patient doesn’t show any symptoms. Despite the lockdown the figure is creeping recalcitrantly, the entire nation pulling in one direction and the tiny Corona in the other. We seem to have done better than many first world countries, simply because we have put human life first and economy second, more importantly, people have mostly volunteered to abide by PM Modi’s lockdown instruction despite tremendous suffering at many levels. People have accepted him a leader by heart. By following the governmental instructions, people are in fact contributing to nation building.

To give a communal spin to the Corona narrative, a burly female Muslim Corona patient is hugging the staff by force. The latter are panicked and making video to let it loose like a bomb in the media. ‘Allah is one!’ she is imploring. She is right theologically, but feeling of love and compassion is better saved for normal times. At this juncture, this compassionate goodwill gesture appears nothing sort of a war against the exploitative kafirs. Many Muslims actually think that they are being selectively targeted to be taken into quarantine. Funny, they behave like an injured sheep that is being taken for dressing, but raises a ruckus like it is being taken to a butchery. In Pakistan, the ulemas have said no to the lockdown conditions and are as zealous to have namaaz gatherings like before. I salute their religious zeal, but even god wants them to be careful using common sense. God wants them to open their eyes and be watchful. If Corona doesn’t actually spread in a mosque, as many hardcore zealots have claimed, then there will be many who will temporarily change communal affiliation to turn Muslim for the time being to escape from Corona.

Very rarely one finds people runny away from the bank notes. You see a few frounded bucks and ten hands get into action, even at the cost of getting trampled under slaying heels. Now you see the bills and legs get into action. People fly off the scene, lest the Corona sticking to the paper catches them. You invariably see the glint in people’s eyes whenever the prospect of a shilling landing in one’s hand from another hand arises. Now you see fear and suspicion whenever you get into the horrible situation of receiving money. You pray for online payments, where Corona cannot break the virtual frontiers. People hold the bills like a ticking time bomb. They abandon it in an untouchable corner of the house and run to wash their hands. How I wish we never had that liking for money in the first place. The fundamental nature of money surfaces: it’s unavoidable, but we have to keep our hands clean also. Keeping the conscience cleaner will be of further help. Elsewhere, there are almost daily instances of the patients misbehaving and even manhandling those who are trying to save their lives. Does Corona affect brain functioning also?

Judges have flown from the courts like rats from sinking ships. Corona doesn’t bother about the hammer strike of justice. It has its own court of summary verdict of death and disease, a kind of mass punishment for our collective miscalculations. The most urgent of cases have been but in the basket, even the ones that appear never to culminate and where Indian history’s biggest blunders are awaiting remedial measures. In any case, someone at least gets the good pat from the hand of law. In Rohtak, the court opens to facilitate the marriage of a local youth to a Mexican girl. They met on some online site. The state doesn’t want to leave any stone unturned in getting one youth married because here patriarchy has resulted in a sadly skewed sex ration, leaving many boys ineligible for marriage. Moreover, the gori bahu is a coveted one in this part and the administration goes out of its way to facilitate things, a hangover from the colonial times I suppose.

PM Modi has been ranked as the foremost Corona warrior leader in the world because of his handling of the situation. In social media, PM Modi’s meme are doing virtual rounds to encourage people in the fight through flight and hiding against the invisible enemy. Trump and Abe have in fact been given negative markings and are well below our PM. High time the world leadership learns to think in uneconomic terms sometimes, especially when precious lives are at stake.

Well, an ambulance on the road has acquired more might than a tank in battlefield. It commands respect because this is a health emergency, a medical war. But then you can never underestimate our eagerness to get into business, especially the jalebi type spiraled characters. An ambulance is caught. They are actually ferrying illegal wine instead of patients or medical supplies. I wonder they may even smuggle gold and drugs under a body on a hearse.

India is supplying Hydrochloroquine, the anti malarial drug touted by Trump as the Sanjivani against the evil Corona, to 55 countries. It appears to have helped the patients; now but there are reports that it also leaves an adverse impact on the patient’s heart. Another little disappointment after the tiny sip of euphoria.

The people from the entertainment industry must be in the most depressive moods because the world they thrive in doesn’t exist any longer. Now the celebrities themselves are cooking, washing, cleaning, cribbing and are caged in like any x, y, z fan of theirs. The fall of celebrity status. When people can’t be even their own best versions, forget about them running in a dreamy world to be a super-fan of someone. That world has vanished temporarily. There are no heroes and heroines except the doctors, paramedics, policemen and volunteers busy in the war against Corona. You have thousands of real life heroes, so people hardly care about the virtual heroes. A bigger movie with real character is being played.  

The nature throws her nano-meter size googlie and all those, whether front-foot smart masters or back-foot labor-like sloggers, get clean bowled. All walk back to the pavilion with a sad look. The front-foot enthusiasts enjoy Mahabharat and the back-foot apprehenders take solace in Ramayan. The bails are scattered on the grounds and wickets broken. The biggest economic recession in the past 100 years is building up. But not more people are dying of hunger at the moment. It means the problem is never about needs. It is always about the greed. The problem is about more and more, not about basics. The grotesque monetization of our rampant ambitions gets hit in a recession, nothing else.  The loss is in the virtual economic quarters. On the plane of reality, we have the same number of grains and the same mouths to feed to stay alive. The US crude oil price falls below zero dollars price. The tower of greed falls in a recession, but it crushes many at the base also, the consequences. As China builds up storage of grain through vigorous grain imports, a famine may build up, giving them many more strings to pull in the international markets. But an object of ire by many is always prone to lose in the long run. They will realize it in the coming years.  

A new aesthetic and caring aspect of administration shines with pleasant vividness. Migrant laborers, who couldn’t reach their homes hundreds of kilometers away, are locked up at a dharamshala at Palwal. Of course, the district administration is trying its level best to give them food and shelter. A human being but needs more than that. In the sprawling garden, set up in neat rows, sitting at safe distances, they watch a magician performance. He takes milk in a little vial. ‘This is one case of Corona,’ he holds the little bit of milk. Mixes the contents into a bigger glass. The contents become more to fill up the bigger container. ‘If that person doesn’t listen to the government, he infects more like this glass,’ he admonishes. He pours it into a still bigger tumbler and again it gets filled up. ‘Those more infected cases infected more and more people,’ there is a message  for them. They understand and clap. These are little workshops where the crude layer of insensitivity born of fight to survive is being peeled off to help them see a better way of thinking. It will help them in the long run.

There are lone wolves who cannot keep their personal miseries in them. They have some hidden angst and spit it out as the stream of miseries rushes past against each and every foot around. The CCTV footages have grabbed such vindictive moments. The fruit vendors are seen spitting on fruits before selling them. How long one can stay safe? After all, one has to surrender a bit of self-defense network, and that is where the chink gets opened. It breeds insecurity. If you learn to ignore, well and good, but if you are worrying kind, then God help you!

The CCTV may grab these saddening moments, but what goes undetected is the mob thrashing the people of a particular community, just because a few fools have maligned all of them. Migrant Muslim artisans, who are staying at a place for more than a decade, are scared of getting out and being caught by a crowd. Unfortunately, the pathetic conduct of a few thousand Markaz Jamaatis has cast a shadow of doubt over the entire Muslim population. Now people get scared whenever they see a Muslim out in the open. They think it might be someone wandering as a Corona terrorist! Corona in its communal form is really dangerous. Not to be left behind, the OIC countries have condemned the recent developments in India and raised concern over the present Islamophobic trend in India. The cabinet minister for minority affairs has refuted the charge and said India is a heaven for minorities. The OIC has a right to espouse the cause of Islam anywhere in the world. But where are they when millions of Uighur Muslims get imprisoned in concentration camps in China. Religion is hardly the criterion for condemnation. It is decided by so many economic and foreign diplomacy matters. But it is very easy to dupe illiterate unsuspecting Muslims through craftily hatched narratives.

Indian doctors are using the plasma therapy. Plasma of recovered patients is tansfused into the active patients to help them fight the evil. As we see, 80% cases are asymptomatic, so those carriers whose immunity is higher may be safe but they can spread it to the people with lesser immunity and that is where the real risk lies.

The WTO has turned a puppet of China. Its chief is reading out almost communist party press releases issued from Beijing. He just doesn’t spare any chance to save China of any wrongdoing in the pandemic. International institutions are up for a big shaking once things settle down.

The people in Western culture love their freedom and liberty. They are feeling victimized under the lockdown. They are itching to jump onto the stage of life and pursue the same age old materialistic lifestyle. Not too many lessons appear to be noticed even in the face of such tragedy! People in America protest and defy lockdown with placards reading ‘My Body My Choice’. Little do they realize that it’s no longer my body, it is about our health. Corona will find it easy to beat down such a divided house. In Brazil, it even turns into a parody. The President himself jumps onto an open jeep, without mask or gloves, and protests against the lockdown in support of the crowd that is baying for some unknown authority’s blood that has clamped lockdown. They want their jobs. They cannot see beyond the little confines of self interest. Earlier people fought to die for their nations. Now people cannot even co-operate to stay safe. Nobody is asking them to fight and risk life, now to be a soldier means just to keep hiding. If the champions of liberalism continue for free movement like this, it may open far more vulnerable fronts for the enemy. God forbid if Corona plagues Africa! Many African countries have just one ventilator for three million people. One just shudders to even think of the consequences!

Yogi Adityanath shows rajadharma by not attending his father’s funeral. The CM didn’t break the lockdown measures. Well, we have the grooming of a future PM of India under tough circumstances!      

The Unknowable

Talking about the ultimate reality, Osho said it’s that stage in the journey of a seeker when after knowing everything still more remains to be known. Material science tried to crack the code and frantically searched for the fundamental particle that cannot be further divided. If ever they arrive at the primary material constituent, they can claim to know all and everything. There won’t be any unknowable. But as they have found, there is no fundamental entity. All the previously assumed smallest entities kept on subdividing, finally merging into the endless depths where everything merged into nothingness, leaving them clueless where to spot the primary constituent. All this merges into the never-ending spools of energy, sparks, vibrations and frequencies. It’s a screen where even our thoughts, emotions and feelings—which itself is a movement of subtle energies as substantial as the gross manifestations of energy movement on the visible level—can project our own creations. And creations of physical sciences have created many means of convenience for us.

I would even deter myself from calling it maya, the illusion, because we can call something illusion only in relation to something permanent. There is hardly any permanent entity, apart from the unknowable rule of the rules which says the first part of the statement.

If there is no ultimate destination, one may ask, then why should one go on a quest to know, realize or feel the secrets beyond the boundaries of our ordinary sense perception. If all remains to be known after knowing everything then why take the path. Why this quest? In my opinion, it’s our humble attempt at upgradation. Consider for example, the routine life of someone defined by the basic driving forces of sense perception, the life set on the most basic, littlest stage where basic instincts of fear, greed, anger, jealousy and hate confine life into a tiny ghetto which is very engaging. This is no moral judgment against anyone who sets up life in a tiny cell. It’s never about morality or immorality or a higher life or lower life. In my opinion, it’s about the actualization of the potential. All are free to choose. If one can be joyful in the little so called prison, then what is the problem? Why then hatch a bigger one?

Coming to the life at the most rudimentary level, I however take it as a life spent in a tiny cell, its boundaries defined by self-set parameters, majority of them simply adopted in the name of conventions and prevalent beliefs. Where is the creator, the godly faculty with us, if we spend life merely as a product, as a creation? The problem with spending life in a little hovel is that there is hardly any possibility of becoming one’s best version. One doesn’t become a creator. The things that pile up in the congested space narrow down the space further. The grip of the prison turns to literally enslavement. As one sees things piled so precariously overhead in such a narrow space, we get further scared of its fall. We crib because we hardly have the space to move.

Doesn’t a prisoner feel very relaxed, if he is let out from the cellar and allowed to go into the yard outside? He feels relaxed. He will feel still better if put in a spacious garden, and still better in open spaces. Same is the case with us. We want to evolve, to liberate, to move freely, to feel relaxed, a sum and summary of that nagging pinch of restlessness that always reminds us that something is missing in life. Under the open skies and the vision set on the distant horizon, we get opportunity to create, the real destiny of mankind in this avatar—not in relation to anything in particular but freely as per our benchmarks. We know that there is still something beyond the horizon—and the horizon will keep shifting as long as we keep on moving in our quest—but we don’t feel imprisoned because there is no fixed boundary. The limitation of our vision to make us see till the horizon doesn’t create a fixed boundary. One can move on and on and be part of a larger and larger reality. This is what I call creation, the basic steps towards liberation. Liberation is not about reaching the boundary, the final destination, because in that case one will still be a prisoner with the ultimate wall blocking the view. Liberation is in moving towards an ever-broadening horizon. Out of the open possibility, we change the congested cell into an open panorama where the unknown doesn’t imprison, but keeps on beckoning us through a see through walk-able horizon in the distance.

I don’t differentiate too much between knowing and awareness. Knowing is the seed that sprouts the fruits of awareness. Knowing is the beginning of awareness. The awareness of more and more leads to the realization of something beyond even knowing and awareness. Call it Samadhi, moksha or liberation. The enlightened ones whom we revere are not the ones who have cracked the code. Nobody can. The honest ones will accept, the businessmen types will create more wordiness to drown the primary question within itself and earn some more respect from the followers. The revered ones are the ones who created the most. Who walked to the distant most horizons, who walked to the brink of liberation and realized that come whatever may, it’s the same circle beginning and ending at the same point. One spreads and spreads the awareness to finally realize the point. Awareness spreads so much to be sucked into a point. Realisation is all awareness condensed into a point. A divine sublimation. This is the creation of the little seat of godliness. They inspire, they guide, they heal, they do most of the things we believe them to be capable of, but beyond that all remains still as much unknowable as before. 

Vaccine for a new virus and an old ideology

The total number of Corona infections is around 3 million, a third of these in America itself, and majority of the American cases in New York, the symbol of its socio-economic and modern-day cultural might. The death toll stands around 200,000, a quarter of these in America itself. This is an oddity and leaves the field open for interpretations even by amateurs like me. After the jolting shock, now the narrative shifts to the real cause. A French Nobel prize winning scientist has termed Covid-19 as a man-made virus from a technical point of view. It’s a scientist’s conclusion, not some willy nilly amateur thinker like me. A team of Indian scientists has also pointed out the unconventional nature of the virus, i.e., it’s something man-made.  

It makes the Chinese fruit market theory almost groundless. If their fruit market theory doesn’t sell, they will go for the second best option: accidental spread from the lab theory, assuming that an accidental death is more pardonable than an outright plain calculated killing. But we the targets will use our brains to see beyond the China manufactured narrative, which in any case is bound to be substandard like any of their products. Even if we accept their accidental theory, a common sense question arises. How come Beijing, just a few hundred kilometers away from Wuhan, stands almost untouched, while New York, thousands of kilometers away stands ravaged so terribly? Let us not forget, accidents are accidental in their ramifications also, not so selective to target cities thousands of miles away and sparing congested, crowded urban corridors in the vicinity of the accident site. No wonder, questions are being raised about China’s culpability in the biggest bioterrorism case till date.

Millions of people have travelled from Wuhan to the rest of country, still how come it got localized in Wuhan only? If it is so contagious as to board a flight and spread from dozens of fliers to millions in a span of two three months, how come the rest of the Chinese territory stands untouched? Is lockdown so effective as they claim? India’s experience with lockdown proves that it certainly is effective to an extent but not like Wuhan where very soon things turned almost normal and the rest of China almost untouched. Despite India’s strictest in the world lockdown measures, the virus has spread across 430 districts out of 550. Just lockdown is not sufficient to contain it like the Chinese did. There definitely is more to the story. In 2019, there was enmass TB vaccination program in China. Was some vaccine served in the guise of TB mass vaccination?

Many are the loopholes in a democracy, even if it is a superpower like America. There is a tendency for things coming into the open. The political aspirations of the opponents always keep door open for ventilation, secrecy hardly finds a suitable closed door here. But a hardcore dictatorial communist regime has all the time and resources to hatch any evil design in leisure time without bothering about any pull from political, social, moral or legal strings. It’s not about the relative good or bad of a political ideology. The simple possibility is that power tends to be misused. And unquestioned power corrupts absolutely. The suffering world needs vaccine against Corona. The suffering Chinese masses need democracy.

If just a few hundred international flights from Wuhan to the rest of the world can create such mayhem, imagine what will thousands of domestic flights, in addition to rail and road transport networks branching out of Wuhan, will do to China? The Virus seems to be very lenient on the mainland. Or is it a different strain than the one which turned too adventurist to turn a globe trotter and board a flight? The site of the accident hardly bears any signs of the accident, while far off places have the tell tale signs of mayhem! Strange! Usually we have things messed up at the site of the accident. This incongruity itself leaves enough scope for suspicion on China and makes it liable to give clear answers by default. This doesn’t seem to be some accidental leak from the Wuhan lab. Had it been accidental, by the natural consequences of it, the maximum effects would have been in Beijing, not New York. It is however another matter that they will try to create new pockets of infections in China in a controlled manner in order to avoid an eventuality where the road accident site appears absolutely safe and clean and the glass, blood and bones scattered in another country. That is crazily funny.

The Chinese government hasn’t forgotten to make money even out of this misery. Faulty Chinese testing kits are slapped in our unsuspecting faces as if these are the aides of Corona. India rushed to buy 600,000 testing kits. Can you believe it, the accuracy rate of the testing kit is a miserly 5.4%. In their zeal to export as much as possible, they hardly care about quality. We always knew about the sorry tale of their quality. However, substandard toys is one thing, quality compromise in life saving equipment is a sin. But do they even have this term ‘sin’ in their red book? More than 63,000 PPEs out of a big stock India has imported are found totally unusable. Same story is told by many other countries. Even when the entire world is suffering in this pandemic, they remember profiteering through the same use and throw substandard Chinese goods. There is a sorry tale of faulty masks also. China the ambitious exporter has exported a terrible googlie this time. Company shares are crashing world over, China is all eager to make gold out of misery. They are running to take over downed companies. They rushed to sail in many Indian companies also. They tried to buy shares in HDFC, one of the biggest banks in India. The Indian government had to bring out a mid-night resolution to change the FDI norms to stop the dragon from eating many an Indian company. The dragon cribbed and condemned it as unethical as per WTO norms. Look who is talking of rules and regulations?!

Several voices have now started surfacing to make China pay for this global suffering. American state of Missouri has filed a lawsuit against China and asked for reparations. Of course, China has scoffed at it. It’s like a little boy throwing a pebble at the fiery dragon. In return, they have increased patrolling in South China sea, intimidating smaller countries in the neighborhood. The US aircraft carrier Roosevelt had to be taken off the stage of Chinese hegemony here. The aircraft carrier was prepared for the biggest military threat from any quarters, but Corona turned too smart for its cosmos-hunting radars. Hundreds of sailors got infected. So in the open waters of its personal pool it consolidates its forces now. Its warships are coming dangerously close to little Taiwan. Although America is reconnoitering the area through its B-52 bombers, but is anyone in a position to say anything if China grabs South China islands or even attacks Taiwan. They hardly bother about humanity’s recovery; instead they are carrying out military exercises. Possibly they expect retaliation later or sooner. Their already iron-hard firewall, keeping their subjects well caged, turns steely and sprawls further to take a deadly grip even over gaming platforms because the users can chat with the players from abroad. They must be propagating their own narrative like communist states usually do.

Corona is lethal, but the Chinese communist ideology is even more lethal. For the former we need a vaccine, for the latter, democracy—a very feeble pill though it is—is the cure. As the world stands victimized, we should not forget that the Chinese common people are equally victimized. In fact, their tale of victimization is hardly known and spreads over many decades.  

Mindfulness: The next frontier in our evolution

During the ancient times, when our ancestors roamed merely as one of the animal species, saving themselves from the stronger animals and managing to stay alive on roots, herbs, fruits and killing the manageable games, the only fear to plague their mind was the instinctual, plain and raw fear to preserve life. It was the raw fear of fierce animals and horrible weather conditions. It wasn’t forged in the workshop of mind. It existed on the little stage of life, something concrete. It instinctively popped up like it does in a deer on seeing a lion: The plain raw fear instantly triggered by the sight of an object, animal or inclement weather.

The special neurons in human brain then started firing pretty extravagantly, giving us cognitive abilities within a tiny span of time, a sort of leapfrogging on the small-paced changes on the evolutionary scale. While the rest of the species would just react in the typical fight and flight manner managed by their limited neural abilities, the humans learnt to respond, not just react, in multiple ways, a whole lot of combinations of fight, flight and many things in between. The genesis of the scheming mind! We could defend also, mixing fight and flight in suitable proportions. Most importantly, we would remember the precious lessons learnt. We would remember to repeat something beneficial. We also remembered to avoid the harmful. This discretion, this mental evolution, provided another dimension to evolution which turned the physical dimensions of evolution almost redundant. Now the mind evolved. The shadows grew stronger and more substantive than the actual substance. The shadows took the lead and the physical body followed. A peculiar reverse engineering! In amazing series after series of cooperation and using exceptional neurons in the brains, most of the physical threats, the source of raw fear among we primates during the initial phase of our evolution, were managed. We set up institutions of various kinds as we followed the shadows created by mind and trampled and dragged the poorly littered around physical substance, this planet, along us in the wake. We contrived real weapons to defend the shadows and attack the virtual opponents. We set up social, economic and political institutions to strengthen the shadows. Religion was set up to reinforce the real concrete fortifications to save the shadows created by an ever-working mind.

Now we rule over every nook corner of the planet. All the species are subservient to us. The weather elements are explained through climatology. There is hardly anything to create a sense of raw physical threat in the natural world around. We seem to have done amazing things. Are we better placed than our ancestors?

Well, all our cognitive evolution and growth was triggered by our response to the raw physical threats around us. The networking within individual brains and within a group on the basis of shadows tamed many a substance around. In mind-born reverse engineering, we could contrive physical laws to pull the substance by the swift horse of the shadows. If hatching physical laws to prove substance from shadows has been our unique mind art, framing of social, economic, political, religious and cultural laws is merely a cakewalk. It’s as easy as putting air in any vessel as per the suitability. So the juggernaut moved on and we prevailed over one obstacle after the other.

We have been so relentless that even our fear appears to be scared of us and sunk deeper into the zone of virtual domain. It has learnt to survive, if not tangibly like earlier, but intangibly by spreading its mutants. It has crept stealthily into the complex networks of our psyche. All this while, as we triumphantly claimed one victory after another over all the physical adversaries on the planet, the cunning fear was mutating into something beyond the boundaries of innovations—I don’t prefer the term discovery—to physically tame the fierce animals and adversaries. It was breeding larvae in the cells of our very own mind which we so bravely used to tame the external threats. It is like the doctor herself catching the illness.

The solid block of ice, the raw fear, melted first and later vaporized to sublime forms and filled the very air we breathe. It infested the mind, the very same mind that claimed to have won the battle for us. Plain fear of physical threats, the mere substance, changed into the lengthy spools of shadows in the form of insecurity, hate, greed, lust, distrust, anger, jealousy, apprehensions. These are the phantoms of the poor raw fear. The more we broke the ice blocks of physical threats, the more copiously the phantoms did the round. Fear mutated very horribly from the physical dimension to the virtual dimension. There it acquires infinite ways and means to take any shape triggered by any little external stimulus. Earlier a mammoth created raw fear. It was a tangible solid block of ice. Now a mere look by someone can self-start the fission reaction along the phantoms of fear in the virtual dimension of the mind. The mind that hunted animals is now hunting itself. It has evolved to hunt, to stalk. Now it connives. It creates virtual enemies, the shadows, and attacks, defends, reacts and responds in crazily littered orbit. It has the fatal addiction to eat its own tail. It’s prone to grab any stimulus, some remark by someone, some bruise on the ego, some strain of jealousy, and boom-boom goes the explosion. The entire civilization load is a virtual fuel tank. A crazy machine it has become. It just needs a little sip of external stimuli, a tiny self-start, and the engine purrs to life like it has been doing for the last many millenniums.  

Now the externals—the little patrol for self starting stimuli—lie within the human society only.  Gone are those prehistoric real physical threats. We are more bothered about someone’s image in our mind than our ancestor was about a fierce mammoth. The mind cannot stop its factory of manufacturing war tools against the phantoms in the virtual dimensions. We have imagined the best and hence all these beautiful things that make life physically convenient at least. But alongside we have imagined the worst also. In lieu of one smile, we hatch dozens of tears also. Mind hasn’t stopped on its momentum of contriving solutions, reactions and response to threats, if not physical now, against the virtual opponents. It innovates its own opponents to keep rolling along the same direction. Because that is its tendency. That’s how it has evolved. But rampant growth in the virtual dimension loses its footing as the substance pulled along gets disconnected. How long the virtual shadows will pull the real chariot? The latter will lose its wheels. And once the chariot falls on the physical plane—with the cord broken—the kite of shadows takes death dives. Reverse engineering falls flat. Shadows can die easily because they never existed.  But the substance dragged along, battered and bruised horribly meets our eyes. We feel defeated. The leftover from the cognitive revolution!

No wonder mindless, undirected race of the mind has turned self destructive. Anything turns fatal beyond a limit. Same is with our mind. It innovated to kill. Then it innovated to save. Only to start innovating on something bigger to kill with. And then solutions again. It has been very clever along the way. It has set up the modern society in a way, through its blind competition, rapacious ambition, herdish education, plundering politics and everything else, that all our efforts to be human take a long detour to churn out bigger virtual enemies so that it keeps on handing us nice tricks to checkmate the threat and remain relevant and so dear to us.

It’s high time that we break this self-destructive momentum. People have been trying it individually through spiritual practices, the arts of managing the mind. However, the collective mind of Homo sapiens is so powerful that it swipes away individual efforts like a rapacious, spiteful flooded river tosses away little boughs and branches of the fallen trees.

Accepted that it has helped us reach the top on the planet. We are grateful. Now let us stop its juggernaut before it’s too late. Let’s break its age old momentum of first seeking enemies, virtual now, and then give us a helping hand. Let’s redefine education and learning to help spiritual pursuits of mindfulness. Mind is a wonderful slave and a terrible master. We never needed mindfulness more than now. The individual and collective mind has been allowed to function too mindlessly. It has become a despot. Absolute power corrupts. The mind has been corrupted in its reckless ambition. Let’s make it answerable to all its tricks. Let’s restructure socio-economic, cultural and political norms in a way that the mind sees the fundamentals of life instead of the infinite puzzlement in the virtual dimension. Don’t get scared that our ability to innovate will diminish. It won’t. It will increase as we will have surplus energy left out in our reserves. Come let’s tame our mind, systematically and institutionally. Individual salvations have been ineffective in bringing larger common good. Let’s target collectively now. Let’s put substance before the shadows. That would be more natural. Let the mind be tamed a bit to help this earth survive as we know it for some more centuries. Happy Earth Day!       

An antidote of democracy against the communist bug

China is crafting a suitable narrative to the Corona suspicion theories. As they find that the suffering world's prying eyes are now sternly focussed on the deliberate, or inadvertent, unleashing of the virus from the Wuhan lab, they are drawing the discussion and accusations away from the Lab to the animal market theory. They have raised the death toll in Wuhan by 50%. They want the world to believe that the only wrong they did was to cover up the number of deaths at the most, and that the virus spread accidentally from the food market, so that the bigger accusation of the virus being deliberately unleashed from the Wuhan lab gets into the background. So that the most serious accusation against them comes out to be that they tried to cover up the seriousness of the issue and consequently suffered themselves first. They are accepting a lesser fault in order to cover the main one. A note for sceptics who may say why would they allow their own people to die in order the wreak havok outside. We shouldn't forget millions have been eliminated under the communist ideology. So allowing a few thousand of their own people to die in order to achieve làrger targets is very much of a routine task to them. They themselves are infected by a more serious thing, which they consider more serious than Corona. It's the democratic movement in Hongkong. The antibody of democracy was eating into the vitality of the communist bug. They were scared that this bug will bite their mainland. So who knows they might have put a bigger bug in the global body. Just like they helped Corona spread through the world, the entire world should come together to facilitate the antibody of democracy against the communist bug. Right now we are in need of a vaccine against Corona. But the world peace in future needs the antidote of democracy against the communist bug in China. As they stand culpable in the Corona pandemic, punish them by forcing them to adopt democratic reforms in the country. Multiple voices are always more effective in forging a narrative. Build the narrative of democracy in China. It will be good for the Chinese people, 90% of whom are the most diligent and nice type. Just 10% communist thugs are holding the peace of their own people and the world at large at random. As the entire globe suffers Corona effects, let the Chinese communists also face the consequences. Let them get huge injection of democracy on their pride-swollen ass.

Some boring lines from a Corona-shadowed corner

You read, hear and say only the same word these days ‘Corona’. All other words appear to have lost their footing. Thoughts and emotions are solely defined by the word ‘Corona’. An entire planetary culture hijacked by a single word! All discussions, opinions and analyses are centered on the same. News channels hold the highest TRPs, of course being given a tough game by Ramayan and Mahabharat. Three decades back, the roads in India would go empty when these were initially telecast. Irony, even now the roads are empty, for a different reason though. And people have Corona as the modern version of the evil in their mind as they feel angry at Kauravas and Ravana.

All fears have withdrawn and merged with the big river ‘Corona’. The small tributaries of mundane fears falling into the mammoth gorge of Corona to make it the most powerful stream at the moment. I hope this mass focus on ‘Corona’ isn’t feeding the devil. Such mass concentration on something on the basis of collective phobia, and resultant feeding of negative emotional energies, might be energizing the evil item of focus at the subtle level of subatomic movements of energies. Main thing is that our moral is very low presently and the enemy seems very confident and strong.

Right now with over 2 million infections, with one third in America only, it’s going pretty tough for human. It seems vital organs of the modern human body have caught infection and the rest of the body is shaking with fear. With all manifestations of consumer culture and materialism out of the scene, and humans locked up in their houses, things appear very bleak. It gives a feeling like a humungous elephant, a sky high pre-historic mammoth, has collapsed under its own weight. Lesser species meanwhile creep out of their hiding and smell and snooze around with part fear and part excitement.

The Easter mass at Rome Basilica went as a silent affair. A masked Pope led the mass at an empty church. Easter Sunday went so silently as if any extra noise will boost the enemy moral. Christianity’s grandest feast was no feast at all. Let us hope there is a resurrection of dreams on the day of resurrection of Jesus. But we have to ensure that re-living after the interlude commes with changed priorities. Certain values need to be overhauled.

The same was the case with Shab-e-Barat. It’s celebrated as a night when the destiny of individuals for the coming year are fixed. Allah forgives the sinners. The Markazis must be over-hyped in their prayers today to seek forgiveness. The Muslim festivity was forced down with only a few errant kids trying the sneak into the graveyards to light candles on the graves of their ancestors. The police chased them away. The Mecca altar is empty. The devout throngs are missing. The spacious yard is able to see the face of the sky. Churches and temples are empty, godliness trying to regain its footing. This is the time to seek godliness within.   

There are stars in the darkness. They twinkle with a promise of light. They promise a fine sunny day. At Narmada, an eight month pregnant policewoman is waging a war against the pandemic by still going for duties. Of course, there will be an end to the night. The only question is: Will we go out into the sun with our lesson well digested?

Misti, luscious sweetmeats, still holds its charm for Bengalis. It appears to fuel their decent set of culture and rotund brains. In Kolkata, sweetmeat-starved Bongs thronged a sweet shop, braving police sticks on the way, to grab something sweet. Those who succeeded must be really cherishing the trophy. Much as they love to sweeten their tongues, hearts have soured a lot during the Corona-lynched times. At Asansol, people created a scuffle and big ruckus. They didn’t allow the return of 19 well quarantined and declared safe residents of the town. They will bring Corona, they said. The administration had to lathi-charge them to get the poor people in. Their neighbours will definitely stare them as the agents of Ravana for the coming days.

Police is trying its level best to locate the still missing Markazis. The UP government has announced a reward of 10000 rupees to anyone informing about a still absconding Zamati. The ever persistent communal virus gets an accomplice now, Corona. The cocktail is lethal for India’s social fabric. On top of that Pak would definitely spare no effort to help the virus in India. The Haryana government has slapped Article 307, amounting to culpable homicide, against the hiding Zamatis. It has something to do with deliberate act to cause death and can be help guilty of murder. Well, prisons seem to always smelling for blood. With the crime rate coming down, and prison cells feeling hungry, the government gets them the prospects of a few good ones, for the carriers of Article 307 bring a special status on their errant self onto the prison yard.

Prisoners are getting out on parole. The village has three native returnees. One murder charged man comes out from Tihar jail. One brat who was caught transporting illegal liquor into prohibited land of Bihar and who was languishing in a jail in Patna comes out. Another under trial for nearly killing someone in a family feud sees the free days for the time being.

Bhilwada and Agra model of containment have attracted international attention. It is basically about creation of hot-spots, sealing them foolproof and going for door to door testing. It means breaking the chain from building up a trail of infections. In Agra, a family was traced that had visited Italy. They traced the entire set of people who had got in touch with them. They completely blocked the 3 square km area and did extensive testing there. Hot-spots are the frontiers where the government of India is waging its war with its limited resources. It’s like attacking the enemy’s pickets and stopping it from adding to its army infection carriers.

With around 700 thousand infections and 25000 deaths, most of them in the financial and the modern cultural hub of New York, the superpower is on its knees. Wooden coffins are in shortage. They are using cardboard coffins and burying hundreds in long rectangular mass graves. An earthmover doing its duty solemnly. A person dying of Corona carries the ignominy of total alienation from near and dear ones during last days. To make it worse, the last rites get cut down to a mechanical affair with an earthmover replacing emotions and tears of many those who had known the diseased. It’s like dying an unknown death far away from home.

Delhi is feeling the Corona heat with hundreds of new cases every day. The CM has formed a 13000 member strong Foot Warriors to facilitate testing and quarantine. The administration is using drones to keep watch over curfew infringement in narrow lanes and congested bylanes because we Indians have a special liking for infringing upon the norms.

India’s stature appears to have gone up. Kuwait has requested the Indian government to help them fight the pandemic. The Indian government has sent a 15 member Corona Response team to plan, coordinate and train them in managing the affairs. High time that all governments keep pandemic response task forces in future against such emergencies instead of wasting precious resources on military build-up against enemies of the same species.

Sanitization tunnels are being set up to clean the bug from clothes. Hope they could kill the bugs of blind ambition also that hatch larvae inside our minds and hearts. Some fashion houses are making designer masks, fearing running out of their business. I hope even fantasies take a bit of utilitarian course where they help in substance instead of just being virtual symbols of human desires.

Cases of domestic violence have gone up. On March 8, women in Paris had come out protesting on the streets demanding equality with men. Now they have been forced back in. There has been a 30% increase in domestic violence. The increase in violence shows that so many people are in fact staying like enemies under the same roof.

This year there are huge mosquito swarms droning around almost like the airmen of the Corona army bombarding the humanity on back foot. The dogs howl almost continuously. Peacocks hoot night and day. All these are considered ill omens for the humans. I hope they aren’t deliberately stalking we humans to instill more fear in our scared guts.

International food chains have collapsed. Stock markets are almost redundant. Oil well left undisturbed. Materialism is missing. People are simply surviving on the basic minimum. One thing is proven: it’s possible to survive without most of the modern day things which we find irreplaceable.

Most of the government officials are working from home. A new model is emerging. Higher functionaries are using video conferencing.

My 15 year old court case seems to have been chucked out by the evil Corona. It appeared to a friendly lady judge. She appeared fairly sympathetic to this injustice lasting for the last 15 years. Like stubborn incorrigible brats the government attorneys kept on asking for more time pretty shamelessly. It seems to have served their purpose. Corona has helped them by forcing the courts to down their shutters. The current judge most probably will be shifted by changing the roaster and get some easy to handle judge and pull the strings like they have done for a decade and a half.  

An overenthusiastic Nihang Sikh chopped off the hand of a policeman on duty as he tried the religious zealots from violating the curfew. His evil mind, blindfolded by misplaced faith struck the policeman with such brute force that the hand was severed in one brutal strike. Thankfully after a 9 hour operation the hand has been fixed. That’s the irony, those who can kill are found taking shelter in the holy precincts of faith.

On the banks of the Ganges, some foreigners come out and are made to pay for their offense by the police by getting them write sorry 500 times. I am happy that they get some homework done after years. All of us can learn something at all stages of life.  

In Surat, the unorganized sector workers are thrown out. They are jobless and hardly any money. They get out on the street to protest and draw attention. The well off are sulking inside because they cannot come out to get onto the bandwagon of enjoyment. The poor are sulking because they are away from home and lost all sources of income.

The Corona fear has sunk deep. In Ranchi, a crowd protests against the cremation of an elderly Corona infested dead body, saying they will get the infection in the area. The police had to arrange for cremation outside the city. In Chennai, people took their fear several notches higher. A frontline Corona warrior, a doctor, who has fallen to the enemy, is criminally denied cremation in the city. People are adamant that getting the body into the crematorium will spread the deadly Corona. There have been numerous instances when administration couldn’t get gravediggers to bury the bodies of Corona victims. They had to use earth movers to dig the graves. Fear and the instinct of self preservation brings the worst in us.

Presently there are about 25000 Americans in India and they feel safer here than America. Out of the scheduled 800 Americans to board a special flight only 10 took the flight. The circle seems to have taken a full turn. Will it be India that will be leading the world under PM Modi? There is a high chance for this happening. India as Jagat Guru again!

Today is the last day of the 21 day lockdown. The PM gave a public address and extended it till May 3. There have been terrible economic costs but the humanism shown by him has done wonders to curtail the pandemic. In contrast, the country heads who had more attention on economy seem to have done terrible injustice to their people. Today is Baisakhi and Dr. Ambedkar’s birth anniversary. The political and cultural festivity of both occasions is completely overshadowed. The opposing forces on the divide have melted under the Corona shower. All ideologies are running to take shelter under the same roof. All are the very same scared Homo sapiens. Why cannot we stay like this when things are normal?

The PM’s speech giving the seven point formula to defeat Corona is hardly over, at Bandra you have a scary scene. In the afternoon, many thousand migrant workers rush out and stampede around the railway station. Someone has spread the rumor that a train is leaving for UP and Bihar. So people rush to catch the train of life. The think they will perish here even though the government is providing food and shelter. I think these people have forgotten how to sit at home, without doing anything. Taking rest is obsolete. All want to die at their native places. Quite surprisingly, none of the few thousand have any luggage with them even though all seem ready to jump into any train nearby bound for any destination. Mischief mongers are at play to spoil the hard-earned little victories in little skirmishes against the enemy patrols at numerous points in the huge country.

Finally, the spring stands almost vandalized by the hot summers. However, all reasons have their unique charms. If spring has luscious pout of youth, summers have the graying wisdom of ripe old age. A pair of collared dove is caught in the love loops. They are seen together on the roofs scouting around for a suitable place to start nesting. The cuckoo sends its sonorous notes over the crests of hot air to catch the flirtatious attention of the lady. The kari patta has little pale creamy flowers baked by the sun. The delicacy attracts honeybees and a romantic pair of Pieris rapae, a white butterfly with black dots. They take nectar sips and go diving and dancing in the hot eddies of the summer air. The bats are overactive as the twilight builds up. We never had so many in recent years. Probably they are feeling empowered because of their Corona-carrier status.

A sun-beaten old rose stands as the link between present and past, between spring and summer. It tells its little story to the summer angels:

I was once luscious red,

Now the colours get shed,

Spring dews nourished me,

Delightful to see,

Now the colours turn pale,

Youth, how thou sail!

Sadistically sun-kissed and old,

Death takes me in its fold,

I but hold with grace,

                                               My wise, toothless smile up for a brace,                     

Earlier only my skin used to glow,

Now the entire self in mystical flow,

I choose to smile till last,

Let the summer sun go crazy with blast,

I arrived with smile on my lips,

Now the entire soul takes divine sips.

Somewhere, in the safe interiors of central Indian countryside, a Rahat, water wheel, is still chugging out buckets of water in a corner where life is still in slow motion and hence enjoyable. This paused life shines brilliantly against the background of Corona-driven gloom. Still not all is lost. Things of utility still fulfill their purpose. In the gleaming waters of the swimming pool of a posh gated colony, monkeys are professionally jumping from balconies and giving expert strokes. And they have spectators from windows who are even scared to get onto the balconies. Very obedient audience indeed! Leopards come out and have a look in the spacious empty Chandigarh roads. They have sensed the unusual calm and serenity from the last hideouts in the neighboring Shivalik hills.

In a summer beaten flower bed, like an old sage an old rose appears to give some lesson in life and living:

Then, dew-kissed youth fed by nourishing spring.

Now, sun-kissed old age forged in the furnace of summers.

Then, kiss of life, love and living.

Now, kiss of death and decay.

Mother's kisses are simply kisses,

Just that our ego fumes and hisses!

Enjoy nature from your balconies. Within a month things appear brighter and cleaner. But don’t go just by the visuals. Visuals give a part of the picture. Have a pan-shop of the panorama. Then close your eyes. The other part of the picture will unfold in the brain through birds chirping, sighs of breeze, swaying of branches and so many others. As she smiles through flowers, she sings through birds. Her smile is charming. Her song is very sweet. Those who love nature will at least never feel shortage of love in their life irrespective of any kind of circumstances.

Corona has stalked Europe. People are suffering terribly. But the skies are free for starlings murmuration! The moments when the laws of physics, chemistry and biology mix in the divine fluidity of the unknowable ultimate law. Certain things are left unexplained. A sense of marvel is all that we need to appreciate the phenomenon of higher dimensions. Murmurating Starlings! One of the most joyful moments in the world. Mother Nature's way of expressing freedom and liberation to the core. Allow her to smile. She will surely help us smile in return.

Life is supposed to be a big, fat, intriguing and interesting book. Don’t think this is the end of the world. It isn’t. Life is literally a cascading cocktail. More the chapters, the better it is! So if a particular chapter goes stale, wind it up and save your book from becoming boring. No need to waste energies on a plot that isn't building up. Create fresh characters. Start a new chapter. We are the writers of the book of life. So keep creating life and living out of the infinite pools of cosmic energy. Keep your book interesting!

The fights over faith and religion appear so hollow when all the shadows of our misdemeanors has shifted off the scene. Javed Sahab has full 'faith' in his 'belief'. Sadguru has full 'belief' in his 'faith'. All I can grasp is that they are saying the same thing in different ways. Two sides of the same coin! When did you think that mere words will resolve the unknowable mystery. The rest is just professionalism, either spiritual or film making. And words help us in establishing ourselves in this physical world. They are as much carriers of reality as toilet paper is!