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.