Battling with loneliness

 

With every passing day, there are newer and newer idioms of oppressiveness churned out by the ill-famed virus. The entire set of individual, institutional and collective dreams of we humans have been deferred till a time when there is a vaccine available. The scientists are working day and night and look the biggest benefactors as of now. The seductive scent of the buzzing outdoor life in its dazzling array has stopped flowing. In its place, the air in the streets and roads feels in cahoots with the enemy that is loitering around with a stormy magnitude. Ironically, within a few weeks of the lockdown all of us look like a downtrodden species of the earth. 

Why sulk fella, you have the option to be a creator to beat the lockdown blues!

Life is supposed to be a big, fat, intriguing and interesting book, literally a cascading cocktail. More the chapters, the better it is! Creation is ever eager to expand from the tiny edge, the little point, of your existence. Facilitate it. At this point, you exist at the interface of matter and consciousness. It's a far more dynamic state of wonderful transformations in comparison to either pure matter or pure consciousness. There is a heaving pull, a pulsating throbbing born of love--hate relationship between matter and consciousness. These are the teasing pulls from opposite directions. A tantalizing see-saw churning, giving rise to myriads of forms, shapes, thoughts and emotions. Of course these are temporarily built, like you have waves in the sea. This is what we say the manifestation of the tiny crests and troughs in the cosmic sea. And we have a far bigger role in manifesting things with our thoughts and emotions than we think possible for us.

So be a creator. You have this genially protruding option. Go out with this resilient narcissism. In the fleeting fluidity, you write mundane and not so mundane tales. Of course, these are like lines drawn in the air or on water. Almost inconsequential! But that's how it's supposed to be: The inescapable urge to stamp a momentary inscription on the slate continually changing designs and patterns. But your choice guides the waves further. As a creator your destiny can be immensely foreseeable. Set yourself in your very own securest solitude within the self and churn out swirling souvenirs of miracles. Your options glide through the cosmic medium. It might be temporary, but it can't manifest without you! So create well, manifest well!

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 with enlightening sagaciousness. Start a new chapter with aristocratic reflections. Despite all the peculiar undercurrents of existence, we are still 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!

Most importantly, as a creator be prepared to jump off the tightrope! You have to nurture distaste for all your fear and phobias that keep you yoked to the smaller version of you.

You become your least version, when you enslave your emotions and feelings to your mind and take logical steps to be a mechanical achiever. You also become equal to your least version when your emotions enslave your mind, leaving you in the fiery whirlpools of abnormal sensitivities. You become your best version when your thoughts as well as feelings are the master and slave of each other at the same time: The mind playing the master when emotions falter; the emotions playing the master when the mind burns out. Balance buddies, balance! It's like walking the tightrope with the pole held expertly. The two ends of the same entity, the very same pole, thoughts and emotions, counterbalance the fluctuations. You need them because you have chosen to walk on the tightrope, on the thin linear dimension drawn taut and straight by the tension forces of ego. In this dimension, the best version is an unfaltering walk with the pole held almost horizontal with the opposite ends of thoughts and feelings straight, at the same level. That is rarely possible. Only the realized souls who somehow decide to walk the tightrope, may be to guide the humanity ahead, are able to manage this. There is still another option. You can decide to jump off the tightrope, onto the broader plane, onto the smooth motherly land, where walking isn't a torture, where fears of falling fall away just because the thin course defined by the ego tension drops off. It doesn't mean that you will lose your thoughts and emotions. They will be there, just that these won't be mere survival tools, nibbling into each other's territory to define a limited, curtailed and scared walk that life turns out to be. As you walk on a broader plane, thoughts and feelings don't compete against each other because your fears, defined by ego and self preservation, have vanished. You walk leisurely. Your thoughts and feelings simply stored in their sovereign domains. These are no longer emergency ammunition to wage a battle of survival. They become mere faculties. You can use them at will, or not at all. They lose their grip on your consciousness. You feel free. You float. From a sweating, struggling walk on a tightrope, to a leisurely walk on a broader plane, and still ahead to a free floating flight in multiple dimensions. These are the options all of us have. Take yours!

De-cluttering of mind will help avail the best options as we stay indoors and the shattered dreams of a normal life pile up around you. It may sound convenient to blame nature for our current woes. However, nature is not with anybody. Neither is it against anyone. It’s for us to decide whether we are with it or against it. The onus is on us. Since we are merely its part, it suits our purpose if we go with it. Going against it means going against ourselves. But that is what we have been doing presently, especially since the industrial revolution. Our brains turned the crowns of our ownership of the planet as the sole proprietor species. The weakening of the overall system manifests primarily in the weakening of its constituent parts.

In a single-species environment, the rest of all subservient species get threatened with extinction, just like Corona virus imperils our cells. The exponentially growing species may think that it’s moving towards the crowning glory in terms of development, it’s in fact moving towards a pointed summit where maintaining a perch is impossible. So why move so laboriously towards a little point, only to topple down and start all over again after the crisis. Why not maintain a less ambitious broad high point, i.e., a plateau. The rise will be full of pause and the perch on the pinnacle point will be safer and broader. Why do we aim for pointed summit which is unsustainable? Why can’t we raise the bar a bit less seriously and move to another plateau only at a higher elevation. I would call it finely graded growth. It doesn’t collapse rapidly.

Among an all-pervasive melancholy, Corona is now the most dreaded word. Corona positive is the most fearsome status. It’s re-contextualizing the entire set of living and stalking the entire humanity. The enemy is invisible and quite wisely we have locked ourselves in the safety of our houses. Meanwhile, the high summits of our economic and financial hills fall down.

It’ll be too shortsighted if we just consider Corona as a malady in abstract. Corona isn’t something that has somehow surfaced randomly. It’s merely a symptom of the greater malady with the ecosystem, something to do with the entire earth. It’s just an indication that there are far bigger problems than what we may envision just looking at Corona.

Suppose there is a body having severely compromised immunity. Naturally, things are supposed to collapse. But there will be a trigger somewhere in some part, in some organ, to let the manifestation start. Corona is just one of the triggers that indicate the grievously harmed immunity of Mother Nature on the planet. Beyond the point of whether the Wuhan virus is lab-created by the Chinese regime or jumped out of inhuman gluttony cascading through the live animal markets in China, the basic point is that it’s a symptom of an ailing planet. If not Corona, something x, y, z will unleash the same consequences. If not some virus, it will manifest through the virtual virus of human minds to create phobias, fears, greed, humongous egos and envy to catapult destabilizing forces to penalize the errant society.

Open-ended are the options for the effects to manifest in lieu of the cause, our unsustainable practices. The effects can manifest either through man-made mediums such as wars, civil strife, terrorism, natural calamities, or these can simply manifest through the rulebook of nature in their unseen, intangible ways. I am no perpetual doomsayer, but my only point is that with our awareness we should have known better. We could have done better. It’s not simply enough to go after inventions and discoveries. An equal amount of our energy and resources to estimate the consequences of our actions could have turned our practices more sustainable.

In the face of this pandemic, where are the earth-shattering issues like Brexit, trade wars, geostrategic brainstorms in top government offices to control regions, military pursuits, tensions on borders, etc.? If we can survive without them as we do during the lockdown, we can do the same even post-endemic. As we sit in silence after many decades, let’s just cast a look at the mountain loads of unnecessary things that we have crammed in our minds, houses and bazaars. Let’s start de-cluttering.

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There is a voiceless feeling conveying some soul's scars from the past. It looks like always seeking a painful metaphor to get expressed and make a sense to the logical part of my brain. It tries to jump out of anonymity from the poignant pit of karma buried in the sand-mines of memories attached to my consciousness.

In my past birth, I was a simple Taoist follower in a quaint mountain village in China. Then the atheistic Chinese Communism breached the fort of our peace and silence. I fell victim to their blatant, rampaging force creeping up the hills to forge a new China, a ‘making’ that first involved million times ‘breaking’, the so called revolution. And revolution drinks a lot of blood like an ever-hungry glutton. At the time of leaving that body, two extremes sealed my fate, the driving differentials that create karmic force to propel the soul to adopt another body: my love and liking for Taoism on the one end; and my dislike (almost to the extent of repugnance and hate) for the atheistic Chinese Communism. The past can’t be shaken off too easily. We carry our karmic imprints, the scars on our souls that need a few lifetimes to heal. I carry mine in the form of my surrender to Taoism and my frustration at the ways and manners of the Chinese communists. I know this chasm stalls my own evolution, and forgetting and forgiving will surely facilitate my spiritual evolution. But maybe, just knowing it isn’t sufficient to do the same. This lifetime of hate, and my consequent stagnation in my spiritual evolution, will help me balance out the negatives of karma. Forgiving will surely settle the score this very moment. I know it. But is forgiving that easy? Especially when you are carrying the scars from your past birth!

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In its voyeuristic spirits, the matter—energy interplay at the interface of cosmic consciousness scattered the seeds of ever-lingering sensuality for growth and expansion. The ultimate void, in its majestic magnitude, entitled this tiny planet with mundane sexuality and we had the first drop of life.

Billions of years ago, in a little water puddle on a tiny speck of dust in the cosmos, there was the littlest of a spark, a spark that opened a new dimension in the zone of matter energy transformation. It sowed the seeds of a new possibility, a new manifestation of energy, a far more dynamic form, life as we know it, a temporary balloon in the stream, a microcosm of the ultimate cycles, the little drop that contained the essence of the whole.

The matter had been lying in the mould for billions of years before that spark. Now it took the course that would leave it further down to the world of you and me billions of years down the stream. That spark, leading to the formation of the first cell, paved the way for the ever-going matter—energy interplay to be interjected with still subtler transformations in a new dimension, the first drop of life, the first cell, a new possibility, a new prospect for the transformation to evolve cyclically in far subtler forms of not just bodily limbs and organs but emotions, feelings and thoughts.

The single-celled amoeba in the primordial sea ruled as the rudimentary carrier of the delicate most traces of consciousness on this planet. Its sovereignty lasted for millions of years. After the initial blasting stage when earth, this lump of gases, was catapulted into the solar system, it took billions of years for the matter to get into a state of relative stability, like the dust blown by a storm takes many hours to settle down. The evolution of the first cell was no miraculous turn in the state of matter. It was just a phase when the storm of matter—energy interplay and transformation could adjust a new dimension in the same transformation, where it was still about matter—energy makeover but with an additional factor of rudimentary consciousness in the same equation, the new factor hardly disturbing the primordial equation. Just that it self-evolved to maintain the earliest laws as things settled down on this tiny planet.

There being no difference between matter and energy, just that matter is visible and energy isn’t, physical science tries to correlate them through the equation Energy=Mass x square of the speed of light. We can say that mass is that apparent energy that has been stabilized to the extent of so low frequency as to make it visible to our sense perception. It is simply a state of energy. In this apparent stage of relative stability, another dimension of energy opens up to compensate for the shooting off tendency of the energy. It’s consciousness. It opens up as a factor of the square of the speed of light. No wonder our thoughts, emotions and their resultant scenarios building up, forever popping up, are simply the manifestations of that surplus raw energy in its pristine fleeting form that has to somehow spend its creative force in one form or the other.

In this manner starts the game of evolution of consciousness through the suitable means of rapidly emerging biochemical and bio-molecular bridges holding matter and consciousness together. Lo, let there be the first drop of ‘life’ the way we interpret it in the form of single cell amoeba in the primordial sea, like a drop of rain in the desert, and it blossomed up. Energy in the form of apparent mass (stabilized to a fraction of square of the speed of light) was now an empty canvas for the creative force to write as many lines as possible in the emerging story. Time was never a factor. Millions of years went with more ease and less change than we see in a decade these days. There was a pull for the maximum. Not so soon, millions of years down the first spark of the first cell, we had cells clumping together to form as many patterns as possible. The climax reached when you had mega-flora and mega-fauna. There were dinosaurs bigger than the biggest ship in the seas presently. There were birds bigger than the largest cargo planes of the present. Reptiles longer than trains slithered around. There was no hurry. A day of today is busier than a decade of those times.

But then even creation has to follow the law. It just cannot go larger and larger in size even if in this new dimension moderated by an evolving consciousness it felt excited like a child exults after getting a new set of toys. For minion and millions of years since the days of the largest roamers on earth, when rudimentary consciousness rode mammoth bodies, there has been a decline in physical stature of the largest mammals, reptiles and birds on earth.

When the Homo sapiens indisputably controlled earth around 40000 B.C., the largest creatures were mammoths, mastodons, earth sloths weighing 10 tons, tortoise weighing 3 tons, and cats were bigger and fiercer than the modern day lions. These last big creatures were not lucky like their predecessors and vanished too quickly as the Homo sapiens, the epitome of consciousness, not in size but in mind this time, quickly threw the forces of creation into the domain of ‘mind over matter’. Under these forces, the rest of the biggest animals, birds and trees bowed out. Mankind’s mind was buzzing with that huge surge of energy, which had abandoned huge bodies to take the course of bamboozling consciousness.

It would be foolish to think that consciousness is peaking in human brain only. Corona is far more intelligent than us. It has unique structure to beat our immunity and any other medicine and cause death and launch literally a third world war. Mankind may be standing at the top of the food chain in a world where the plant, animal and bird species are vanishing altogether. However, in the emerging pattern of the diminishing flora and fauna, the counterbalancing forces will arrive from the smallest quarters. The counterbalancing arm of consciousness will arrive through nanometer-sized means like Corona.

We have been investing too much to ward off visible threats from our fellow human beings as well as other tangible threats in nature, building up huge armies and stockpiles of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Little do we realize that all along this time, while we triumphantly gesticulated over our supremacy over the fellow human beings as well as other lesser species, the counterbalancing arm of consciousness has taken the path of nanometer-sized foot soldiers, where our armies will be redundant.

Beware Homo sapiens, it was easier to kill mammoths in Siberia 12000 years back. But killing invisible bacteria and virus isn’t that easy. Millennium after millennium we have fought against real animals in the forests and later our imagined enemies bigger than any animal on earth to make bigger and bigger weapons, wasting our precious resources in its wake. The chink in the armor is glaring now: Our unpreparedness to fight against the ‘small’. Corona teaches us a bitter lesson. 

Is there any solution? Of course there is: Instead of pushing the stage of creation into a corner, from where it decides to launch a fusillade through nano-arrows, learn to balance things in all walks of life. Don’t push nature too far into a corner. It always has the option to hit back. It may not be able to hit tangibly in the form of a dinosaur, it can but surely do the same through invisible Corona and many more.

There is a reason why we have pushed mother earth too far into the corner, our intra-Homo sapiens rivalry. Earlier we fought as a unit as Homo sapiens against far physically superior species. Now those threats are gone. So drop your weapons my dear ever-scared jungle man, who is almost biologically molded to keep fighting now after millions of years of fear and insecurity. Saving other remaining species from extinction is important, but far more important is to stop the virtual fear driven animosity among nations build upon false assumptions of ideologies, faiths and beliefs.

All that is needed is a collective feeling of Homo sapiens. When our ancestors set out from Africa 60000 years ago, they could overpower far superior enemies in the battle of survival. Now we stand at the crossroads again. Now the enemy is invisible. It will manifest through nano-particles and other imbalance-born outbursts of mother earth. Fight as a band. Fight as a species. As a globalist. Sow the seeds of love and trust among all the nations.

All the divisions are man created. We can easily remove these. Love for our fellow human beings will sow the seeds of love for this little planet, our house. Don’t try to land on the Sun; try to use the precious resources where in the case of health emergencies our best cities in the world don’t bear the insult of the doctors and nurses fighting without even proper masks. A ballistic missile worth millions of dollars rusting in a bunker and a life-savior doctor fighting Corona without PPEs! See, what have we turned this world into!

Isn’t it that we end up wearing our slippers on the head as a kind of the crown of fools?

The agricultural revolution allowed we humans to keep larger populations under worse conditions. Industrial revolution took it still further by allowing more and more people under still worse conditions. In the last couple of centuries we have further moved on. Presently, around 8 billion people are kept alive under worse conditions than ever in history. The tiny minority of economically well off people have utilities, but they have huge load of emotional suffering. This generation is the worst suffering in our entire history. Why is it getting worse with each generation?

Why is it that the current generation suffers more than the previous one? We are caught in a vicious circle. We have been committing the mistake of taking things of utilities as the currency of life, living, happiness and joy. No, they aren't! We have to break this malafide linkage of the items of utility to happiness and joy in life. This grotesque monetization of the meaning of life in terms of the items of utility needs to done away with. The things which should have been under our feet, we have put them on our heads as crowns. No wonder, we are loaded to the limits and tottering on the path. Life and living is mere struggle.

Throw down the load of utilities from your mind. Walk over them. Use them. Treat them like your slaves, not vice versa. You know what, how funny it appears? It appears like we are carrying our slippers on our head, taking it to be a shiny crown. It's better we put on our slippers on our feet, a place where they need to be, not on our heads. The utilities off the head and you have a confident human going on her journey, the head occupied with better ideas and the heart full of sweet songs.

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X gets axed; Y gets sexed only to be faxed! The desire is steel-latticed. The spirit hankers for a slick script of unbelievable flavor. We move on assertively, life and living chugging into a slow and stately full-scale replica of some unattainable perfection, some vague idea about full happiness and joy. All along the way, brutal and callous antidotes to our maneuvers lurk in the shadows and creep stealthily.

Do we run for happiness, peace, contentment and joy? Or is our pursuit nothing more than an escape from our sufferings, our visible and invisible pains, the vacuums inside which threaten to suck us in, giving us this nagging restlessness, discontent and dissatisfaction? Both aren’t same by the way.

In the former, there is a bit of acceptance and sync with one’s present—however minute it may be—some restfulness, some taste of self-love, that lays the foundation of further journey with something in your reserve which you can offer to someone. You have a choice; you decide to move in a particular direction, simply because you aren’t running from your present like it’s a sinking ship. Here at least you know where you are heading because survival isn’t at stake. There is no emergency.

In the latter, it’s a blind escapade like one dashes out of a house on fire without having much clue about where one is headed. This is an emergency. You go by only survival instincts. And emergency measures hardly lay the foundation of a smooth journey. The basic instincts of survival turn us selfish—not that it’s about right or wrong, or moral or immoral—simply because that’s how creation is. We cling to life-support like a drowning person clutches at the straw. No wonder, we drown the support also. We want to grasp to survive. We rarely hold hands to walk together.

There is nothing basically wrong with these two scenarios. We are just humans. In the former, we are creating our circumstances. In the latter, we are the mere meek product of our circumstances. In effect, they manifest in either ‘make’ or ‘break’ scene, a sort of ‘creation’ or ‘destruction’. In the former, we are able to ‘create’ because we have a surplus of self-love to handover to someone. In the latter, we ‘destroy’ because we are dragging the fusion wire from the last burning house. The former has the possibility to redefine life for better. The latter can turn it meaningless altogether.

Unfortunately, the modern lifestyle and its consequent personal, social, economic and cultural contours hardly leave any room for a world of choice. It’s mostly about the forced necessities. It’s rarely about healthy options. There are loads of issues and problems crammed to the gills at every step. In pursuit of our so called economic growth and development, and the resultant grievously smothered social set-up, we have constricted life and living to create unsustainable vertical towers. Stability lies in horizontal opening up, not just in minds but in emotions and feelings also. Life gets caged in vertical towers as you are just looking skywards. You rarely look at the sideways panorama. Finally, you feel cornered. It’s like a house on fire. We haven’t too many options as we run out to salvage whatever is left of us. Very few of us go out on our own terms with a smile on lips to grab more of life and living, to waddle in the river of nectar just because we have tasted an ounce of it. Very rarely you have seekers of joy simply because they have tasted happiness and now are eager to upgrade their experience for the better. The thoroughfare is crammed with people running away from their miseries. They are exhausted and are prone to lean on any x, y, z shoulders accidently popping up nearby in the stampede.

It brings me to the critical question of modern day relationships. Relationships don’t stand in abstract. They are mere manifestations of a generation. We see that all relationships are drawn taut, always to the snapping limit. There is always more possibility of things falling off the line than a smooth, mundane passage of the day. Why have relationships become so brittle, so fragile? It’s because we just take temporary shelters as we are running away from our house on fire, our dissatisfaction within, our personal pains born of our voluntary, involuntary alienation from our own self. In emergency measure, we are running to get our lives defined by others, simply because that appears the easiest of an option. Working on the self is tedious, but it sows the seeds of great harvest in future. We but grab a few corn-heads along the path as we rush out to survive.

We move into people’s arms predominantly as takers, not as givers. We hardly have anything to offer from our side. Our own emotional scars are so deep that the most we can do in a relationship is to ‘receive’. But our sense of ego will always try to convince us that we are investing; we are giving, which is rarely the case. A woman prone to emotional lynching born of discontentment with her present may think that she is indeed ‘giving’ as she pours out her agony to someone, alongside listening to the tale of woes from the other side. In reality, she is trying her level best to anchor her own footing. A man who offers his so called masochistic, gallant support to her mellowed and teary sea of woes presents himself as a solid embankment to redefine the scattered flow of her life. But just like she has grown too pliable to become a puddle without any course, he himself is lynched by the pain of his solid, stony knot of manliness, he wants to spread. She is a victim of her pliable softness. He is an equal victim of the stony constriction. The initial embanking support to give a course to her life turns out to be a check-dam in her new course as he manifests his pain to broaden his identity in her life through his insecurities and possessiveness. He blocks her and she deluges him.

When two people meet, they hardly talk about the best things in life. They open up the longest tales of their pains, woes and sufferings. That is when any relationship gets doomed right from the beginning. They are two poor ‘takers’ seeking refuge from their own house on fire. How can we expect a good chemistry between two beggars? When one is running away from the house on fire, even a temporary stay appears a wonder dream. In reality, there are simply two scared, lynched souls running to the well to survive. The initial sip of water is solacing like you feel when you get water after almost dying of thirst. But what after that? Do you turn a giver, a river of peace and joy? Very rarely! The fire is too much within. The fire is too big for the tiny sips of water that they both offer to each other. It vaporizes almost instantly. No wonder, these relationships are nothing more than temporary survival halts. Bubbles! They pop up with extravaganza and vanish like nothing happened. Nothing to surprise, we have such massive leap-frogging, literally a stampede of temporary relationships. Here ‘break-up’ is the chorus song. The x gets axed very smoothly and with mountain-loads of justification. Then the y gets sexed up only to be faxed soon. We just continue seeking. As a so called love-seeker on the path of relationships, x, y, z are mere numbers not leading to any destination. They just land one in a quagmire. The past with its ever-growing fires retains its grip on life. On the restless path, the past gets more burdensome because some new number has been added in the love equation.

How many daters we come across who have lovely things to share about their past? Very few! A person who has something to offer in a relationship will definitely have a lot of positive to share about her or his past. The moment you start with a positive past, you are in a position to give something in a relationship, otherwise forget it, you will always be a taker, irrespective of what your ego tells you about your contribution in the new relationship. Good relationships are built among the people who are moving to a better destination, not merely running from their burning houses. The latter are merely accidentals bumps on the way. Only while you are walking with poise, deliberation and choice that you meet happy people walking to be happier.

There is nothing wrong in seeking love outside. But in running out too fervently to escape our own miseries, we miss one basic point. We hold our destinies in our very own fragile fists. External manifestations of love are mere catalysts. Unfortunately, we make them the main constituents of the equation. Be a nice companion with your own self before you take the responsibility of being someone’s companion. Without sowing the seeds of a ‘giver’—it’s as good as self-love (there is a difference between self-love and being egoistic and narcissistic by the way)—within your own house, you cannot expect to have a luxuriant crop of harmony in any future relationship. So guys, when you go for your next date to get a new x, y or z please ensure that you present yourself as a self-loving and caring person who carries fond memories from the past, who isn’t merely running away from a house on fire.

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The night showers have turned this summer morning cool and breezy in the third week of April. Playing badminton under the sky’s fatherly muse carries extra fun. The air also gets a chance to play with the swirling shuttle. All this adds to the playfulness, the basic essence of all games, even though we have smothered it down on the anvil of competitiveness and caged playfulness in the iron equation of winning and losing. So the sky too plays through its airy racket, while me and my brother have our own poor humanly ones.

The China made shuttle is surprisingly holding up wear and tear even after a few weeks of enthusiastic play by amateurs like us. Possibly it has drawn inspiration from Corona which is also pretty durable unlike the rest of use and throw substandard Chinese consumer goods. The shuttle has ruffled plastic panels, a mark of the gamesters’ brattish gusto. A champion of orderliness would have thrown it away, but a disciple of disorderliness like me finds many more games in it, just because its ruffled, spiked look of an ungainly youth adds to the swerving dynamics and hence the playfulness, which is basically what I look for.

The summer sun is playing hide and seek through the big flakes of white clouds floating in the sky. A pair of Pieris rapae, a white butterfly with a couple of black dots on each wing, floats with nature’s best playfulness. The nearby kari patta tree has little cream flowers. It must be delicious to the sucklers because usually a lot of honeybees and butterflies hover around. In majestic combo, the delicate feathered beauties take sips of juice from the plant and swirl full of love and bonhomie in the eddies of cool morning air. The manmade plastic butterfly, the shuttle, is also going this way and that way, marking the trajectory of the happy spirits of we brothers.

It has been a juicy breakfast for the butterflies. One of them takes a fancy for the flying man-made butterfly being beaten between two ends. It swirls around it as the shuttle glides without much force midway through its course. We find it quite playful. The butterfly is too agile and mischievously flirtatious to get harmed by the poor slow moving shuttle. Many times, it pleasantly glides past with amazing sleekness and show of agility.

Bad things are as distant or near as the good ones. To our horror, the butterfly—the innocent participant in our playfulness—tumbles down during one of its maneuvers. It has not been hit visibly, at least to our eyes. Some slight grazing may be. But we shouldn’t forget the softness of a butterfly. What appears a harmless graze to us might be fatal to them. It flutters on the ground and can’t take off. I hold it as delicately as it is possible and place it among the leaves of the nearby flowerbed. A sort of fragrant hearse for her! I have almost given up hope of its survival. Again a proof, how easily we fall into the pit of dejection and disbelief.

Its wings, antennae and legs appear unbroken as I inspect. But the poor thing can’t take off as it tries its best to fly. In their dimension, flying is life; any extended stay is for sure a harbinger of death. Here the only pause comes with death. Aren’t we humans blessed to have awareness to choose such reinvigorating pauses? I leave it to rest and repose keeping a keen eye on it. Meanwhile, unaware of the human-born fatalities, its partner is flying over the little tree. Its movements but lack that freedom born of unspoken support which a butterfly couple gives to each other without speaking about it. It too takes a fancy for the shuttle. Possibly it must have thought that its partner has become bigger. We stop playing to avoid committing double fatalities on the butterfly kingdom.

It’s a sad sight. A butterfly is made for flirtatious flights in the air. I touch its wings with the end of my little finger. There is life. It saddens me to be the cause of all this. Not that I am too sentimental to become self-injurious. Just that I see a glimpse of god in this tiny creature. If one cannot see godliness in such beautiful little winged creatures, I am sure he will be missing it somewhere among humans also. There is hardly any qualitative difference when it comes to having empathy for an injured butterfly or an injured human being.

I have heard that a bit of water can save lives. I decide to try the same formula that I applied to a house sparrow that had been hit by a vehicle on the road. Three decades back, as I walked to the farm-side, a bamboozling truck took a sparrow into its furious eddies and I found it collapsed by the road. I picked it up and went to a water puddle and put some water into its open beak. Its eyes were closed. Lost in my innocent concern I went cursing the driver. Holding it on my palm, I walked like a little birdie doctor. A few minutes later it opened its eyes and was in a position to sit on my open palm. I walked proudly to have saved a sparrow’s life that will definitely become my pet without a cage out of gratitude. I completely believed in this possibility. To break all this childish belief, the sparrow flew almost perfectly one fine moment, may be after 10 minutes in my hand. I felt hurt and a bit irritated at that time. I am so happy now at the memories. Letting go is ultimately for the benefit of all of us.

So now I try my water solution. Only that the winged life is too delicate and tiny this time. I take a bit of water in the palm of my hand and moisten my fingers of the other hand to target littlest water drops around its mouth and the leaves around it. I cannot choke her to death with water. It is a minute job, like a watch repairer does. I creep on all fours to accomplish the water dosage. Finally, I see the tiniest of a star just around its mouth. I see it fluttering a bit more lifefully. Definitely it has regained a bit of strength. The place is reasonably secure from predators, so it can bide its time. I go off the scene for some time. As I come back to check after a few minutes, it is not to be seen. I have a right to assume that it took off like the sparrow did. To confirm my faith, I see a solitary butterfly flying lowly on the opposite side of the bed where I had placed the injured one.

Never bind your care and concern to the quantitative scale. The sweet essence of a drop is as good as the entire sea.

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The summer is purposefully creeping ahead through the days of April. A sinuous sense of frustration is palpable at the collective level. All of us look apprenticing imprisonment as people try to align life-long pursuits to the narrow confines of their houses. The loud-mouthed theatricality is shorn of its excited narrative. The stage gentled by the virus looks a drab place to the majority of the people. We seem to have misjudged many a thing. Mechanically institutionalized teachings of modernism, having left us tangled in a kind of time warp, need a lot of course correction. With my deliberate decision to be sidelined, all I can do is to jot down 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. Ironically, 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 of these in America only, it’s pretty tough going for the humans. It seems the vital organs of the modern human body have caught infection and the rest of the body is shaking with fear. With all the 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 comes 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 destinies 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 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 piously open to 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 lessons well digested?

Misti, luscious sweetmeats, still holds its charm for the 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, the 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 neighbors will definitely stare at them as the agents of Ravana for the coming days.

The police is trying its level best to locate the still missing Markazis. The UP government has announced a reward of 10,000 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 Pakistan 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 the accused can be held guilty of murder. Well, the prisons seem to always smelling for blood. With the crime rate coming down, and the 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.

The prisoners are getting out on parole. Our village has three native returnees. One murder charged man comes out from the Tihar jail. One brat who was caught transporting illegal liquor into the 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. Corona means imprisonment to many and freedom to a few.

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. The administration 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 of infection carriers.

With around 700 thousand infections and 25,000 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 the family, friends and relatives. 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 band of 13000 member Foot Warriors to facilitate testing and quarantine. The administration is using drones to keep watch over curfew infringement in narrow lanes and congested by-lanes because we Indians have a special liking for infringing upon the norms. We are very particular about bypassing laws.

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. It’s 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 the 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.

The 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 the cases of domestic violence. The increase in violence shows that so many people are in fact staying like enemies under the same roof. They just hadn’t enough time with each other for the true colors of animosity to show up.

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. The 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.

The international food chains have collapsed. The stock markets are almost redundant. The oil wells lie 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. How much they will perform away from their offices is an easy guess. Usually a typical day in a government office is a touristy cakewalk. Working from home will only add to the usual fun. A new model of ease and comfort is emerging. The higher functionaries are using video conferencing. They have to stay in picture even if it is from a distance.

My 15 year old court case seems to have been chucked out by the evil Corona. It appeared to a friendly lady judge. She looked 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. With the court shut, it looks the possibility for injustice has come down a bit. When the court will open, most probably the current judge 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 stubborn 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 inhale free air under open skies. They 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. Most importantly, the word ‘sorry’, which is on the verge of getting obsolete, gets a jolt of rejuvenation.  

At Surat, the unorganized sector workers are thrown out of their rented accommodations. They are jobless and hardly possess any money. The homeless horde get out on the street to protest and draw attention of anyone who may help. The well off are sulking inside because they cannot come out to get onto the bandwagon of enjoyment. The poor are suffering because they are away from home, lost all sources of income and don’t have a roof to sneak under.

The Corona fear has sunk deep. In Ranchi, a crowd protests against the cremation of an elderly Corona infested dead body, saying it’ll spread 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. The people are adamant that getting the body into the crematorium will spread the deadly Corona. There have been numerous instances when the 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 bring the worst in us.

Presently there are about 25,000 Americans in India and they feel safer here than the most developed piece of land on the earth. Out of the scheduled 800 Americans to board a special flight only 10 boarded the plane. 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 fusillade. 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 and 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 claiming to provide 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 male 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 the present and the past, between spring and summer. It tells its little story to the summer angels:

I was once luscious red,

Now the colors get shed,

Spring dews nourished me,

Delightful to see,

Now the colors 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 the 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 at the 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-shot 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. The people are suffering terribly. But the skies are free for starlings’ murmuration! These are 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 have shifted off the scene. Javed Sahab has full 'faith' in his 'belief'. Sadguru has full 'belief' in his 'faith'. They debate profusely. 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 the toilet paper is!

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Our spirits caved into, our courage and conviction flattened, our stately steps slipped off the rung, and beliefs cowering at the invisible image of the enemy, the situation turning unremittingly grim under the airy wheels of the crushing juggernaut moving around like a battering ram laying our age of gallantry to smithereens, medical scientists are tunneling deeper and deeper into the caverns of their brains to hatch an antidote to the enemy. On my part, all I can manage in the struggle is to suggest 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 focused 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 the skeptics who may say why would they allow their own people to die in order the wreak havoc 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 larger targets is very much of a routine task to them.

They themselves are infected by a more serious thing. They consider it more dangerous than even Corona. It's the democratic movement in Hong Kong. The antibody of democracy was eating into the vitality of the communist bug. They were scared that this bug will bite their mainland also. 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 ransom. 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.

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The virus is making emphatic rounds across streets, booby trapping the transgressors. The empty stage lies with long and desolate stretches. With our lop-sided sense of priority, the little planet appears like a concrete ghost. We have been glowering with grit and stern gaze as we wallowed in the pool of our resources to subjugate all and sundry to turn creation human centric. Now the fallouts are replete with a harking message. Let’s pause and practice 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 a fearsome object, threatening 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 upgrade, provided another dimension to evolution which turned the physical dimensions of evolution almost redundant. Once 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. But 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 rounds. 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 the 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 improvises 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 the 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 the 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.

I accept 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!

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The last week of April leaves us with brighter prospects of unprecedented, scorching heat. Most of the people believe that the famous scorching heat of north Indian summers will beat the Mickey out of the renegade virus. So the people are praying for hottest summers to bake the unseen enemy. A babbling spirit of herbal immunity boosters is pervading the corridors of treatment. There are too many over-fed tulsi, ashvagandha, giloy and scores of many other neglected herbs that are being cooked in millions of kitchens and people are guzzling down liters of potions to become Corona-resistant species. Well, immunity goes up, surely. But in panic we seem to have lost our balance. Even nectar in excess turns poison. Many herbal zealots have mouth ulcers and rumblings in intestines trying to absorb the deluge of life-giving herbs gushing down the esophagus.  

Well, there has to be a vaccine for the errant virus. Alongside, we surely need a vaccine for an old ideology gone horribly off track.

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 abroad 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 remained 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 would 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 crashing world over, China is but all eager to make gold out of this global 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 the WTO norms. Look who is talking of rules and regulations?!

Several voices have now started surfacing to make China pay for this global suffering. The 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, the dragon consolidates its forces now. Its warships are coming dangerously close to little Taiwan. Although America is reconnoitering the area through its B-52 bombers, yet 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 the 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.

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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 at the visible level—can project our own creations.

And the 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, expansion and evolution. There is an ever-persistent potentiality for an incessant flow.

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 fundamental 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 the self-set, instinctual 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. Over a period of time, the things that pile up in the congested space narrow down the space further. The grip of the prison turns to a literal 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 an 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 any longer. 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. Cashing on 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. They walked to the distant most horizons. They traveled 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. Realization 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.

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The PM talked from the heart on his radio show Man ki Baat on Akshay Tritya. The 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 over the ages. Buying of gold isn’t possible this time, 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 the pavements and many tiniest means, mechanisms and contrivances. They are gone. The roadside bubbling commerce is paused and lies with forlorn, faded shades.

In normal times, there is an automated flurry of activities like you witness in an ant-swarm. Survival at any cost is the defining mood. They dig a monumental well daily to earn a living. They are the ones who are suffering for want of goods now under the pandemic lockdown. The rest are suffering in mind basically because they have the food, shelter and clothing without any problem.

It’s high time that we start celebrating festivals in spirit now instead of just in letter through rot repetition of rituals and the ensuing epiphany. We create loud noise on festive occasions to present ourselves to be bold, brave, virile, gallant and hardy. But in reality we are losing our footing inside our own selves with the passage of each generation. We are insensitive and inconsiderate primarily because we are more cowardly then ever and have lost true humanistic guts. 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. I hope all of us will be better players.   

A lime butterfly is braving hot dusty gusts of wind. She looks stout-hearted and strapping gal heaving with strong and vigorous thrusts at the oars of life: 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 heat. They are spring’s hardy, robust and resolute outposts against the desertish nihilism of summers. All of them hold the fort from the side of the spring. Dandelion garden weeds creep and smile from the 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 the man-managed gardens. A little story blossoms in a day. The tiny yellow flowers bloom in the morning and by the time the 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 27,000 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, the 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. The people have accepted him as a leader by heart. By following the governmental instructions, the people are in fact contributing to nation building. Nation building doesn’t require too big a cost these days. It can be safely practiced by anyone. There are endless problems and even a positive thought contributes to building the nation.

To give a communal spin to the Corona narrative and provide instant gratification to the vendors of faith of all religions, the social media is twitching its judgmental tail through the video of a burly female Muslim Corona patient hugging the staff by force. The latter are panicked and making video to let it loose like a bomb in the media. Such clippings go viral and beat the dirties virus in polluting the human race. ‘Allah is one!’ she is imploring. She is right theologically, but feeling of love and compassion is better saved for the normal times. At this juncture, this compassionate goodwill gesture appears nothing sort of a war against the exploitative kafirs. Many Muslims have the impression 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 the butchery.

In Pakistan, the ulemas have said no to the lockdown conditions and are as zealous to have namaaz gatherings as usual. I salute their religious zeal and the brutish coherence of their belief, but even God wants them to be careful and use 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.

The vibrancy and dynamism of easy smiles is gone and many a face crinkle into a frown very easily. Very rarely one finds the people running away from the bank notes. Usually, the wads of currency force most of us to be profound, powerful, timid and stubborn in the rat race of currency. Normally, you see a few hundred bucks on the ground and ten hands getting into action, even at the cost of getting trampled under slaying heels. Now you see the bills and the legs get into action. The people fly off the scene, lest the Corona sticking to the paper catches them. You normally see the glint in the people’s eyes whenever the prospect of a coin 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. The 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?

The 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 put 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 a good pat from the hand of law. In Rohtak, the court specially opens to facilitate the marriage of a local youth to a Mexican girl. They met on some online site. Deft and amiable strokes of love fondled their hearts through video calls. Her heart at sixes and sevens, the girl flies down to meet the boy. This is an avant garde achievement for the local boy. The state buzzing with mandatory manish societal moorings held tightly by over-manly farmers goes ga-ga over the achievement. The state also puffs up with macho, powerful and muscular attitude and decides not to leave any stone unturned in getting one more youth married because here the patriarchy has resulted in a sadly skewed sex ratio, 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. We both love and hate the race of our erstwhile masters.

PM Modi, kudos to his strikingly definitive steps, has been ranked as the foremost Corona warrior leader in the world because of his handling of the situation. In the 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 the 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. The villainy has to manifest its multiplicity at any cost.

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 hope of a definitive cure is in the hotchpotch dustbin called chance.

The people from the entertainment industry must be in the most depressive moods because the world they thrive in doesn’t exist any longer. They must be feeling like fish out of water, gasping for adulation and attention. The hardcore reality leaves them thinly disguised. The stars are grounded and the celebrities themselves are cooking, washing, cleaning, cribbing and are caged in like any x, y, z fan of theirs. Hyper male attitude has to indignantly turn effeminate for the time being: The temporary fall of the celebrity status. When the common people, the fans, 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 the volunteers busy in the war against Corona. You have thousands of real life heroes, so people hardly care about the virtual ones. A bigger movie, validating the core truths of human existence, is being played with real characters. 

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 too many 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 the 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 but it doesn’t hit the prospects of a hungry belly provided we keep the principle of humanism at the core of our economics. In recession desires and greed may starve but morsels to feed the hungry remain the same.

The tower of greed falls in a recession and it crushes many at the base also, the so called man-made consequences. As China builds up its 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 to 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. 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 magic performance. The magician 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 people like this glass,’ he admonishes. He pours it into a still bigger tumbler and again it gets filled up. ‘Those more infected cases will infect more and more people,’ there is a message for them. They understand and clap. These are the little workshops where the crude layer of insensitivity born of the fight to survive is being peeled off to help them see a better way of thinking and living. It will surely help them in the long run to be a better version of themselves.

There are lone wolves who cannot keep their personal miseries within themselves. Some fundamental vanity—resentful and rueful—some inadequacy or impotence is ever eager for a secret fusion with the evil. The insidious absurdity compels them to the byways of wrongdoing. They have some hidden angst and spit it out as the stream of miseries which rushes past 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, telecast day and night by the non-aging enthusiasm of the media, has cast a shadow of doubt over the entire Muslim population. Now people get uneasy 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 the minority affairs has refuted the charge and said India is a heaven for the minorities. The OIC has a right to espouse the cause of Islam anywhere in the world. But where is their care and concern 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. Otherwise the staunchest Islamic country like Pakistan won’t be a crony of the craftiest bully against Islam, China. Remember Uighur Muslims?

Indian doctors are using the plasma therapy. Plasma of recovered patients is transfused 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. With proper screening, the asymptomatic carriers can be a huge reservoir of immunity against the virus which can be transfused into the bedridden patients through plasma therapy.

The WTO has turned a puppet of China. Its chief is reading out literally communist party press releases issued from Beijing. He just doesn’t spare any chance to save China of any wrongdoing in the pandemic. The international institutions are up for a big shaking once things settle down. They will have to adapt to a new muscle flexer on the global scale.

The people in the Western culture love their freedom and liberty which is the enduring centrality of their meaning of life and living. There is a rigorous seething of individuality that revolts against the trashy folkish mentality. No wonder they live adventurous lives which allows them plenty of misses and hits also. The misses give lessons and the hits fetch excellence and brilliance in many fields. The peripatetic souls are now feeling victimized and grounded under the lockdown. They are itching to jump onto the stage of life and pursue the routine necessary for their outgoing, multi-pronged lifestyle.

Sadly, not too many lessons appear to be noticed even in the face of such tragedy! The 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, the situation 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 are clamoring for the very same normal life. With the pocket-sized bravery that one keeps as part of a mob, they yell and chant the songs of emancipation. 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 for a greater cause. 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. The politicians know how to cash on symbolism which predictably spirals into mass popularity. The art and craft of politics is nothing but creating mountains of fan following through the molehills of symbolism. Well, most probably we have the grooming of a future PM of India under tricky circumstances!

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