Still More Agonies

It started with the buzzword Corona in faraway China. It now establishes a firm foot in our history as Sars-CoV-2 causing the corona virus disease (Covid-19). As it ravages India in mid June, destroying all our hollow sense of victory that we derived from the number game that was somehow kept low due to the lockdown, all we can do is to take statistical help—like earlier, for we don’t have any other means as of now—in creating some artificial pride. At 2.9%, India’s fatality rate is lower than the world’s at 5.5%. Currently, Covid numbers have hijacked all sense of loss and victory, wellness and unwellness, growth and decay, and development and regression.

The politicians must have felt almost imprisoned, for they survive on sloganeering crowds. They are further spared their lung power as they prepare for election campaigning through virtual rallies. I wonder, screens may become more familiar than human faces.

The pandemic is in full rendezvous in India after the ease in lockdown. Everybody appears limping back to business, thoroughly battered and bruised. The old normal tries to stamp its sovereignty as people push and jostle like earlier. The new normal however has to be accepted. The world has changed. The Indian government has taken a gutsy step to lift the lockdown even when the curve is moving towards the peak. Let’s see where it leads to. Economy had to be discharged from its home quarantine because we had gone into the lockdown a bit early. And in the world we are acquainted with, money is more important than food, water and oxygen.

The disease is currently ravaging through thickly populated urban centers of Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai. About, 60% of the cases are traced in Delhi, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu alone. Let’s see how do we cope with the coming peak of infections during the monsoon season. The infrastructural shortcomings which are grossly visible even during normal times will surely acquire horrible shapes during such emergencies.  

With the financial nerve-centre and the political backbone of the country lying seized by the virus the situation is indeed grim.     

The hospital situation has turned worse. Bodies have been left unclaimed by many families. It shows not everyone living under the same roof is a real family. Critically ill patients, gasping for breath like fish without water, are falling at the thresholds of hospitals and still not being admitted. Forget about poor people, well presented middle class people have been denied test and treatment matter of factly by many hospitals. Cremation grounds and graveyards are falling short of space to complete the last rites. Crematoriums have said no to cremate the bodies of dead Corona patients. These are the people who have decent medical insurance coverage, some even have still better benefits of central government health schemes, but still hospitals after hospitals are denying them admittance. One can very well imagine the condition of the poor who don’t even have such support on paper at least.

Covid-19 patients are literally left to die or recover of their own in hospitals. It’s utterly callous and insensitive. The bodies are left among the patients in the wards for many hours. On paper, you have no shortage of beds and medical facilities, but in reality there is chronic shortage of even the basic necessities. Sick elderly, cancer patients, pregnant women and sufferers of other lesser disease (non-Corona) are made to feel like they are healthy and normal requiring no healthcare facility.

The government hasn’t yet capped the Corona treatment fees of private hospitals, so they build big mounds of cash as the frenzy and terror about being testing positive builds up. An unbearable medical bill is a still larger calamitous event—bigger than any disease known—for the majority of Indians. Video grabs show how callously doctors treat the patients like they are pariah dogs. The stigma of a disease remains like it was hundreds of years back. Typhoid Mary (Mary Mallson) the asymptomatic Typhoid carrier captured and treated like the biggest evil doer, African-Americans supposed to be carriers of syphilis earlier and Aids, and of course the bell-carrier leprosy patients of ancient times who had to warn others of their arrival. Covid patients bear the legacy in their mute suffering.

The experimental juggling with medicines to treat Covid patients continues. Scientists are trying their level best to elicit an immune response from human trials and generate neutralizing antibodies. Despite many shuffling, unsure attempts to drop it from the shelf, the anti-malarial drug HCQ in combination with some other ones like Remdesvir and Favipiravir continues to hold some promise. As of now, the treatment is basically supportive for lungs, kidneys and heart including oxygen therapy. The force of Corona is so overpowering that other types of sicknesses seem to have suffered. Even cancer appears like something closer to humanity.

It appears we are afraid of Corona more than the death itself. Much as we stare at the doomsday scenario due to the pandemic, Delhi’s three municipalities have actually reported a 36% decrease in deaths during the months of March, April and May in comparison to the same period last year. One of the factors appears to be lesser road accidents during the lockdown. It further appears that other diseases seem to have taken a backseat for the time being. So if the total number of deaths has come down during the pandemic in comparison to the same period in normal times, how come the pandemic laid seize to all we stand for? Probably, it has increased the fear of death exponentially by etching its invisible booby traps at all touch-points around us. 

Good news for the poor people who face difficulty in getting Covid test done. In any case they are always ready to follow the proverb ‘something is better than nothing’. Where there is nothing in life, almost ‘everything’ becomes ‘something’. The loss of smell and taste have been included in the list of symptoms of infection byy the virus. The poorest of the poor have plenty of stench around their hut of misery and smelly frugal food also to carry out these poor man’s test kit, so they can try these if they feel some uneasiness building up. But will they ever forget the smell of misery and helplessness festering their scars when the state appeared to have abdicated its responsibility, leaving them walking the longest journeys of their lives to reach home, hoping that if death has to come, let it be at their own poor homes. They were running to die with respect with their near and dear ones and avoid a dogly filthy death in the urban ghetto.  

Another good news for them as they sit and sulk in their poor houses deep in the villages after escaping from the boiling frying pan of Corona in the cities, where they had gone to earn more and live more. The government plans to build 70000 Km of roads and five million houses to create employment opportunities for these jobless millions. Hope the intention jumps over the paper to materialize on earth bringing some smile to teary eyes.

In our country around 320 million children have faced the Corona consequences including messing up their studies. A brilliant 14-year old Kerala girl committed suicide because she couldn’t attend her online classes. The nefarious combo of patriarchy and poverty is always blocking the path of girl child in India. Even though enrolment rates have gone up, around 4 million girls are still out of school. Sibling care and household chores await them as schools shut down and exams get postponed indefinitely. Nigeria has in fact declared emergency as rapes increased by 300% during the lockdown. Gender-based violence against women and girls has multiplied. Many women could not access maternity services at hospitals, so they delivered babies at home. The newborns missed the customary BCG vaccine that helps the infants in developing immunity against preventable disease and infections.    

Releasing about 3000 prisoners on bail and parole from Tihar Jail to decongest its premises has provided new avenues for petty criminals convicted of snatching, robbery and theft. Habitual criminals are chiefly petty taskmasters busy in theft and burglary. They are the mediocre flies who can afford to hump off of the line of legality now and then without causing too big ripples. After getting released, which of course has happened many times in their lives, they have taken to increase their business. Self-interest and self-preservation comes natural to all species. We human beings have the capacity to stretch it beyond natural limits to infringe upon the very same right of others. We have done the same collectively to other species. The so called criminals, petty and big, do it at the intra-species level within the Homo sapiens.    

The pandemic has reshaped the nature of work in offices. The atmosphere is clouded with pay cuts, jobs on the line, layoffs and furloughs. Pets, gardening, cooking and time with family helped initially. But these things have come as exceptions, or a kind of adventures. But when they become routine, they too turn stale and run to bite like anything.

Virtual meeting through Zoom, realignment of sitting pattern, elimination of touch points, sanitation stations, round-the-clock cleaning and sanitization, and of course work from home have emerged as the new normal. No wonder, people feel alienated personally and professionally. Sanitizing gels are more abundant than cups of tea and coffee and phenyl-reeking interiors kill the perfumed spirit. People coughing into their elbows will still be taken as full of white collar dignity. Gloves, masks, social distancing and floor marking now further widen the psychological distances entrenched in the minds of the modern humans, where all of us are fighting our terribly lone battles.

Lockdown birthdays and anniversaries went without cake. Video calls saved the world. What catastrophe would have befallen us if not for Twittter, Facebook, Whatapp etc?! Internet is the ventilator that has saved our modern civilization from being choked to death. It has saved more lives than any medicine or preventive measure has ever done! People have been trying to kill loneliness by funny poetry and weird watercolors. And of course tortuous is the nostalgia of that bygone era when people went out freely without masks! When we could mingle and hug with gay abandon. When crowds jostled in the markets and eateries were thronged like hungriest sheep in a fresh pasture. 

Brazil is the second worst affected country so far. The city of Sao Paulo is forced to deprive the earthen rights of those long dead to hand over the same to those freshly dead. The graveyards in Sao Polo are crammed to the gills. To clear space for the newly dead, the bodies of long dead are dug up. The bones of the long dead are dug up and stored in bags with tags in huge metal containers. That is the new home of the dead. To qualify to get the swanky new metal container grave, the bones should have remained under the earth for at least three years. They are afraid of tempering with the bones of those who went under the earth less than three years ago. It seems they have some fear that they may hit back, feeling insulted.

The BLM (Black Lives Matter) movement with its killer one knee kneeling posture and anthem of ‘I Can’t Breathe’ has generated a momentum that is now picking up in various domains of life including sports. In India, the situation is boosted exponentially as racism rides piggyback on casteism. The so called upper castes in northern India are relatively fairer than the so called lower castes. Indian sportspersons including cricketers and athletes have spoken out their experiences when they faced casteist-cum-racist prejudices. Noteworthy are the sad experiences of tribals and people from north east India. A former West Indies Captain felt the pinch of a potentially racist nickname given to him by his Indian teammate at the IPL. He has raised the issue belatedly and availed all the pending apologies and explanation by the scared Indian player. In a nutshell, people can’t be as careless about racism like earlier and need to be reeducated.

Closed-door sports, in the absence of riotous fans, of course will be terribly dull affair. The shouts will shift to people’s drawing rooms. The virulent virus has pushed the jostling athletes from the stage to do its own evil cameo. How will the athletes even boost their adrenaline in the absence of that ebullient atmosphere?

Sports are just like riding a bicycle. Their millions of repetitions of their usual move drill those moves into muscle memories. Surely the lack of action during the lockdown must have eased the bulging muscles of some bitter sweet memories. Hugs, celebratory high-fivs, handshakes, headshakes and all types of mingling will take a backseat till the vaccine arrives. Now the shouts of the players and instructions of the support staff will be audible as audience leer over them like peeping toms from their drawing rooms. The players have to mind their words. The video of course will borrow crowd noise from popular video games. Goal celebrations will be muted affairs if not from this doctored videogame noise imposed on the dull pictures. To give you an idea how hard it has become for the sporting world, the soccer coach of a prestigious club had to miss the game because he broke the quarantine rules and went out to buy toothpaste.

The best fashion as of now is PPE suit, glove and mask. The curves will take a backseat and plump winsome people will regain confidence. Body-shaming turns redundant under the new norms of the latest protective fashion.  

Riots will be riots, even if for a good cause. As mobsters loot shops and destroy public property, their armies on a spree to dismantle and deface the statues, monuments and other landmarks of slavery, colonialism and exploitation, Mahatma Gandhi has also been dragged into the matter. The messiah of peace is maligned by the mobsters as a racist. His alleged views about Africans during his stay there are dredged up to demand the removal of his statues in the UK. On the plinth of his statue, ‘racist’ was written. People have signed a petition in thousands to remove his statue in Leicester City.

The BLM campaign is moving like an avalanche taking all and sundry within its frozen grip. In Europe and America, people are breaking and beheading, vandalizing and removing the statues of explorers like Christopher Columbus and Thomas Cook. Churchill also is facing a lot of heat by the way. His big imperialist bloated face was smitten with mud and had to be mopped clean. Churchill and Co are not completely defenseless. They have their far right supporters apart from the police to save them from the rioters’ ire. Far right groups have gathered to save the historical monuments from anti-racism protesters. In the current spell of revolution, the monuments erected in the memory of eminent personalities who used slavery and racism to build empires are under the barrage. Rioters actually believe that they are rewriting history, while in reality it may count as just some fun time out to beat their individual frustration caused by their own deeds in life.        

A brittle and scattered present may help in laying the foundation of a firm future. The mayhem caused by Covid-19 pandemic can indeed be used as an opportunity to turn India self-reliant. The foreign-policies of all the major countries are being realigned from China perspective now. It shows the dragon’s resurgence. Twitter had to shut down 170,000 China propaganda handles. These were directly linked to the communist government to push and prod false information and malafied narratives over Covid-19 and the democratic movement in Hong Kong. Communist ideologues are the masters of coordinated disinformation campaigns. They are expert puppeteers in manipulating mass opinion through social media platforms, so pro-Beijing narrative is spewing through Facebook and Twitter. Their deceptive geopolitical narratives through info-graphics and slogans have raised a military style blizzard to confuse people world over. Meantime, China reports a few dozen fresh cases from Beijing. Who knows, what exactly the truth behind it is. It might again be deliberately managed issue to redirect the changing narrative in their favor.    

The fight to find a vaccine against the common scourge goes on with claims and consequent disappointments. Corona vaccine may be elusive so far, the scientists however claim to have observed the ‘fifth state of matter’ that was long ago predicted by Einstein and Indian mathematician SN Bose almost a century back. Bose-Einstein Condensates (BECs) come into existence when the when the atoms of specific elements get cooled at absolute zero, 0 Kelvin or  ̶ 273.15 degree Celsius. At this low point, the atoms turn into a single entity having quantum properties, with each particle behaving like a wave of matter also. These might be the elusive link between the microscopic world of quantum mechanics and the macroscopic world of forces such as gravity. These may be the foot-soldiers of the yet unknown dark energy driving the universal expansion.  

There are expected to be new norms set for telling small budget stories. Well, Bolllywood on slim budgets appears like something tragic. Corona has the capacity to clip their wildest wings that earlier took their stories to cosmic extravagant levels. How will the famous Indian movies be possible with social distance norms in place? Imagine shooting intimate stories with social distancing norms! Aged actors not allowed on the scene, so either you have only young actors or funny looking youths acting weird oldies. Garish, lavish cinematic spectacle will be replaced by little intimate stories. And what will be songs without those hundreds of set piece musical with dozens of dancers?  

Sushant Rajput committed suicide. Being a brilliant engineering student, he had the guts to wade in the unchartered waters of dance and theatre. He danced in the shadows of illustrious stars in the troupe at award functions. Took another jump to lead roles in popular TV serials; to finally emerge on the Bollywood scene as a very fine young actor. His career graph looked promising. A commendable feat for someone who was a rank outsider without having any filmi connection. Full of energy, life and enthusiasm, he looked set to get in the league of established frontline actors. His dialogue in his last release Chhichhore makes it terribly ironical: “Suicide is not the solution to anything in life.” An alumini of Delhi college of engineering, he was passionate about science and outer space. He had purchased a plot of land on the remote side of the moon in a region known as the Sea of Muscovy. Titillating personal life, glitz, glamour all swirling so powerfully as to leave one dazed. People say the kingpins of nepotism in filmi world had totally sidelined him; he had lost some prestigious offers under the pressure of the coterie. They are well known names. Their reputation is too solid to be shaken by any allegations in this regard. It has started a debate about the flag bearers of nepotism. How he was perpetually made to feel outsider! His instagram post promoting his upcoming movie is haunting: “If you don’t watch it, they would throw me out of Bollywood. I have no godfather. I’ve made you (all) my Gods and fathers. Watch it if you want to see me survive in Bollywood.” The self-appointed gatekeepers of the castle of nepotism should take a notice of it. There is a gang-leader of the star-kid-brigade. He is very effeminate in manners and feminine in likes and dislikes, thus a darling of many star kids, but has lethal machismo of the brutal-most man on earth. No wonder, it turned out to be a terribly lonely place for the outsider boy from Bihar.