Picking up the pieces after the storm

 

Corona has left us with our own stories. She also tells hers. I just listen with lots of sympathy:

I am a residential doctor at a Delhi government hospital. Just like any other student of medicine, I was waiting eagerly for my final year post graduation exams just a couple of months away. Life is so uncertain! Who can know it better then we doctors. On a daily basis we are exposed to the warming sunrays of life, living and healing on the one hand and the gloomy shadow of death on the other. I don’t know which one is more substantial. When life and living prevails against all odds with our support, it seems life is the strongest force. But come one swipe by death and it manipulates the very air in the ward. Over a period of time, a kind of detachment builds up towards both life and death. I know we all have to die. But more importantly, I know that we have to live before that.

The initial panic build-up in the hospital designated as a Covid care center left us clueless. It was the viral blast equivalent of an actual explosive blast. There you see the wounds and physical destruction. Here the wreckage lies in minds as panic and hysteria creeps up the walls of logic and common sense. So we jumped up and tried to salvage all that we could. The fear of the unknown manifests in full strength in the face of a new and incurable disease. We ourselves were as helpless as the patients. But a doctor has to try to save lives and we did all we could.

Pushed to the corners, we turned even operation theatres into Corona patient care yards. Through the sheer strength of mass fear, the word ‘Corona’ was gaining more and momentum in its avalanche-type march across the routine and normal yards of our lives. We flailed our arms like the ship is sinking and you are in an emergency mode. Usually, we doctors feel empowered against the routine diseases as we handle the mission to save a life. However, in this case, we were as much of a prey liable to fall to the new virus as anyone else. Generally, we give our best to save a life. Here we have to devote a lot of energies to save ourselves also. Divided attention means a debilitated mission.

With hundred beds on a floor, it appeared scary to we resident doctors. There was a separate donning area to get decked up like astronauts, where they help each other into the PPE kits. You get suspicious of your hand-washing skills as you go on rubbing and rubbing. You aren’t sure about anything. The nasty microscopic organism might be lurking around to lay ambush. Precaution raised to the power of above normalcy results in paranoia. Let there be the littlest chink in your armor and you are slain. So we padded up like soldiers going to bloody medieval wars and hid behind heavy metallic armor of the uncouth, unsuitable PPE kits. The first layer of gloves goes over the excessively rubbed soft skin. You are scared that some soldier of the evil might have remained behind. The shoe covers appear to make you lose your footprints. You try your level best to steady yourself to be confident of your walk. The overalls take you into the folds of strange anonymity, like you are an alien in a queer setting. The possibility of things going wrong lurks well over the benchmark of calculated risk in medical parlance. You then go faceless to the outside world as you put on an N95 mask followed by a surgical mask still followed by the cap. The withdrawal into the womb of anonymity isn’t still over as another layer of gloves and a face shield or goggles turn you into an altogether different species. You are a thickly armored soldier, cumbersomely space-suited astronaut and a heavily donned firefighter all mixed in one. That’s how I felt.

As the pandemic and the panic arrived like a sudden Tsunami strike, the initial PPE kits were inhumanly cumbersome and suffocating. It shows how unprepared we are against emergencies. You felt tightly squeezed and thrown into the hostile environ of a strange planet like a guinea pig. You lose on something precious to your sense of freedom, making you feel depressive, indecisive and suffocated. Like a lumbering snowman forced into a snowless, sweltering hot valley, you lose your focus as the goggles turn foggy due to your labored breathing. Nervousness and heat turn you a sweating pig inside. You don’t have the liberty to wipe your sweat or clean your goggles. You speak like from a subterranean vault. You are barely audible from behind the covering and hence have to shout to be audible. It scares both the nursing staff and the patients. In case of managing the health of severely ill patients, you are highly responsible for what words you use in your communication. To avoid sounding bullying and rowdy to the patients and nursing staff, we force ourselves to communicate through sign language and hand gestures. Once you go into the cockpit of your PPE kit, you cannot eat, drink or visit bathroom for six hours at a stretch. Sweat drains like tiny rivers over the face. The air-conditioning system is put off to avoid the virus aerosolizing in the central ducts. 

The virus creates Silent Hypoxia, wherein the oxygen level silently creeps down unnoticeably. The patient stays asymptomatic till the oxygen level plummets to a critical point. The normal oxygen saturation level is 99-100%. If it falls below 90%, one needs oxygen support to avoid organ damage. What makes Corona quite fearsome is the fact that the patient doesn’t show any signs of restlessness, drowsiness and difficulty in breathing even when the saturation level has fallen to 80%. This ‘air hunger’ makes it almost fatal.

It’s an ordeal to face dead scared patients arriving with a look as if they are being forced into gas chambers. This acceptance of fear, this surrender of the life force to the veritable agent of death makes the virus all the more powerful as the psychological trauma eats into the vital reserves of energy that would have been used by the soldiers of immunity to build up a counter attack. Inserting oropharynx or swab in the patients’ nose is like performing a big surgery. Not that we find it too difficult. It’s an innocuous cotton bud intended to touch the inside of the nose. All it takes is 20 seconds. But the look of fear turns it into an intolerable ordeal for the patient as if this little medical process is the thin line between life and death.

As a resident doctor, I’m relatively new to see people dying. I was happily awaiting my post graduation exams and get onto the medical bandwagon like in normal times. It’s traumatic to see the first patient dying under your care. The situation makes it all the more painful. They gasp like fish out of water. You are alone on the night shift. The patient dies all alone in isolation beyond the sympathy and support of her near and dear ones. 

You yourself have to keep yourself isolated and quarantined after 12 hour shifts. Imagine two doctors and four nurses for more than hundred patients. As you lumber out of your anonymity, you just try to hydrate yourself as if you have been in the driest desert for months and you simply prey upon water bottles and ORS. You just sleep, work, sleep, work in an interminable sequence.

More than the onerous duties, it’s the paperwork that traumatizes the soul of we doctors. I cannot understand why doctors have to do so much of paperwork themselves. It can be safely designated to some other staff. Doctors doing data entry isn’t too promising for any country’s healthcare system.

The true nature of we humans comes naked during such critical times. We needed blood for a critically ill patient and made a pleading announcement in front of a crowd. They simply vanished. One haggard old man came forward with a few hundred rupees to help.

Nursing orderlies have to carry out the bodies of Corona victims. They think it’s more burdensome than an ox ferrying hundreds of tons of cargo in a rickety cart. They are scared of the corpses and dilly-dally and slip around their responsibilities. The dead body stays in the yard as a ghastly reminder to the patients who get more panicked. We have to run around to somehow get the body sent to the crematorium to salvage some respect for the dead as there are no family members around.   

All I wish is the return of our normal world of six months back. Its irritants and problems now appear well digestible and worthy pleasantries to have around.

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The monsoon has painted it green. Grass, trees, plants and flowers, everything is hurtling towards the maximization of their blooming, luxuriant potential. It’s a reinvigorated world of mildew in the pickle jars, garden millipedes mating in the grass, mold playing musty truant, red milkweed beetles scurrying around as the dandy of the insect world and creepers taking a passionate grip of buxom foliages. The rains have stamped their signature pretty diligently. The non-human part of the world is as normal and busy as any other time, unconcerned about the Covid stats creeping like the deadliest vine that has eaten as much into our minds as it has done to the body.  

By the end of the first week of August, total cases world over stand at 20 million (more than 700,000 dead) with the US topping the chart like a front ranker should at 5 million (1.7 million deaths). India with 2 million cases (43,000 deaths) is promisingly moving in the race to topple Brazil (3 million cases, 100,000 deaths) and occupy second position. The rise in number of cases has turned normal now with India scoring in excess of 50000 cases daily. The hysteria has subsided a bit as we limp back to our old normal, the skewed set of choices that actually pushed us into the catastrophe.

Have we learnt something concrete to force us to redefine life and living on the planet? Certainly not! With our liberties maimed and freedom curtailed, we are waging the same war from our protective bio-bubbles. It’s like donning fire suits to walk through the fire with much agony instead of taking a detour after reflecting over the choices we have made. Our set of deeds necessitated a chain of unsustainable practices that has left us on the brink where natural imbalances will strike one way or the other. The best option would have been a systematic overhaul of all that we have been doing accidentally. We could have chosen to live by a rebranded, refurbished collective choice that would allow us bypass walking through the fire. Unfortunately, like a stubborn herd of sheep hurtling down and over the precipice we aren’t willing to change course. We are just being carried by the momentum of past mistakes. We are more comfortable with being pushed around instead of charting a new course. 

What inroads Corona has made into our lives! On January 30 India got its first case in Kerala. At that time it appeared as distant as death that preys upon others leaving us alive. Then it crept around viciously. The crisis is critically multi-dimensional. It has transformed the way we think, act and dream. Public healthcare system exposed to the seams, companies have crashed and economy almost torn apart. The labor class bears an unseen and unacknowledged tale of a humanitarian tragedy, the rising middle professional class forced to revision future, customs like marriage and social traditions stretched to bearing limits, children are sitting at home and the current education year severely jeopardized on the verge of going as a blank year in academics with exams postponed and suspended. The single-pointed focus on the bio-security measures has encroached into the façade of life like termites in wood. Will being in a bio-bubble turn a norm in future? Probably yes! All the parameters of social, cultural, personal, professional and political life have been dented for the time being. Weddings, study classes, political gatherings, preaching, religious ceremonies, in fact almost everything went online. Is this an indication of the deeply individualized society in the coming times? Internet is the God of course. We will lose human touch because we will be lesser of humans and more of something else, some new species may be.

Democracies have been forced to take undemocratic measures—like the dictatorial regime of the land that sired the virus—to contain the pandemic. Pre-pandemic India looks as much different from the post-pandemic India like AC is from BC in the chronology of years. Well, AC may be termed now as After Corona and BC as Before Corona. Corona for Christ. The name has acquired divinity itself—with negative shades though.

Although the pandemic is infecting more and more people, it’s killing lesser people now. May be people are better prepared at the mental level now. Only one in seven infected is being hospitalized and among those hospitalized only one in six patients needs ICU treatment. Mind over matter basically. Of course, as per the laws of growth, evolution and dissolution, it has to lose its steam. Possibly the disease is getting less virulent. For some time, the flu virus overran all its territories and started affecting lungs, liver, heart, kidney and brain. It still is fatal for particular systems that are susceptible to its encroachment but the majority of people are safe against it as herd immunity builds up. As far as treatment is concerned, the scientists are still paddling around. For the time being, Remdesivir appears to work with patients having mild or moderate symptoms. Dexamethasone works on people with severe infections. Brazilian president says HCQ has helped him a lot. He was sure earlier that his athletic past was enough to make him immune to this ‘mere influenza’. After getting infected, however, he is supposed to draw some lessons not only as an individual but primarily as a leader of a nation that is fighting the pandemic. As they guess about the effect of existing drugs on Covid-19, the easily available and low-cost steroid, Dexamethasone, is shown to cut down death by two thirds among those patients needing oxygen treatment.

Earlier, during the months of June and July, as the hysteria built up, expecting the worst, the government let loose the planning machinery full throttle. From train coaches as makeshift Covid care wards to posh hotels as Covid facilities, the government explored all avenues to cater to the patients of all classes.

Jails are being eased of their burden fearing Corona spread among the inmates, so illegality gets a bit freer hand by allowing more and more fish to escape the net. To ease the burden on courts and jail premises, the Railways is doing away with provisions of imprisonment for tiny mischief such as ticketless travel, pulling the alarm chain without reason, unauthorized travel, trespassing in reserved coaches, hawking, committing nuisance, altering or defacing ticket/pass, littering, trespassing into ladies compartment, smoking in the passenger area and begging on platforms and footboard joyrides. Laws are melting and turning lenient to accommodate a bit of human mischief.  

Social media puts up newer challenges for democracy. Print is losing readership, TV news are going downhill with barely audible remark of sanity among the cackling panelists, and among all this social media with its lies and fabricated facts and figures raises the curve to take possession of mass opinion-making process. Earlier, there were selected and recognizable channels for opinion making to help the political parties. Presently, there are infinite channels for any fact and figure to be twisted beyond recognition and create alternate realities. These realities then clash, leaving many friction points in societies and among nations, making it a more chaotic world.  

Whatsapp and Facebook do not require one to quote any source, no wonder it lets loose a long trail of blatant lies that outshine truth almost instantly. False alarms, fake news, rumors, photo-shopped pictures on Facebook pages and Whatsapp forwards circulating bogus information have created scenarios ranging from mere heartburns to murderous riots. These are potent weapons to stoke and inflame sentiments and emotions. Emotions once roused and triggered generate fear and indignation. On top of this, the already cornered newspaper gets condemned as a pariah as people stand assured that paper spreads Covid despite many reports to the contrary. No wonder, newspaper subscription has plummeted down.

The legal immunity and protection enjoyed by the players like Google, Facebook and Twitter, protecting them from any legal fallouts born of the users’ posts, need to be relooked to turn them responsible actors. The unfettered content on the Internet has turned it far more unsafe and suspicious world than ever. There has to be a fact-checking machinery in operation.    

Bollywood is indeed a very lonely place. Bollywood nepotism versus outsiders debate is building up to raise serious issues. How lonely the late actor Sushant Singh Rajput felt can be easily assessed from the statement he made while promoting his movie: ‘If you don’t watch it, they’d throw me out of Bollywood. I have no Godfather. I’ve made you (all) my Gods and Fathers. Watch it if you want to see me survive me in Bollywood.’ I have repeated this quote just to emphasize how serious this matter is.

Kangna Ranaut has taken a vitriolic jibe at nepotism by pointing out filmmaker Karan Johar as the ‘flag-bearer of nepotism’ managing the careers of star-kid-brigade, where people from outside the filmi families are systematically made to feel outsiders. The ‘self-appointed gatekeepers of Bollywood’ also includes a ‘mean girl gang’ that has the power to expel unwelcome actors from big banner movies. A criminal case has been filed against well established Bollywoodians for their alleged role in abetting Sushant Singh Rajput’s suicide. In the complaint, it has been alleged that the late actor was removed from seven films and some of his films were facing problems in release.

Amid all the distrust and fear, a desert flower shines in the oasis in the dusty barren swathes of Balochistan. It’s a depilated mud wall protecting an age-old battered wooden plain door still padlocked. A Hindu had taken a tiny shop on rent from his Muslim neighbor in Balochistan. The partition time blood and gore forced the Hindu to leave for India. Before leaving his birthplace, the distraught Hindu locked the door and told the owner that he would be returning some day. The landlord waited and on his deathbed asked his children not to open the lock and wait for the Hindu. The lock awaits the key-keeper even after 73 years. Goodness in one heart possesses the prospect of removing darkness from a thousand mean-hearted people around. 

The doctors are trained and paid to save lives. The government rules like a King with all the powers to manage people. There are benefits to push them on the path of their duties. I would pick out the ambulance man of India who has selflessly chosen to serve. Himanshu Kalia (41) and his wife Twinkle have been on a mission during the horrid times when mass panic has turned us full throttle on the path of self preservation. They ferry patients to hospitals and take bodies to crematoriums. They do it for free. Their rewards are in another currency which is intangible to commercial eyes. He has a lot of errands awaiting him like arranging plasma donors, managing funeral services and find out vacant ICU beds. To highlight the extent of his help, we can mention that many ambulance operators charged up to 10,000 rupees for just 5 Kms.

Tennis grand slams cancelled, Olympics postponed indefinitely and football played in empty stadiums with only some PPE clad health workers applauding with gentle demeanor and restraint, the sports sector like others is on its knees. There is a bad news for swing bowlers in cricket. They cannot use saliva to make the ball shinier and get swing. Swing bowlers without their swing are like eagles without their claws. They turn easy ducks for easy prey by merciless batters. Many Pakistani cricketers preparing for the UK tour have been tested Corona positive. Pakistan hardly gets opportunity to play abroad these days so the fans back home must be seething with anger for their cricketers falling to Corona googlie. Even falling to an Indian bowler must appear digestible not Corona. In the depressive sports scenario when most of the players world over fretted and fumed at home, tennis great Novak Djokovic tried to boost spirits by hosting a charity even in the Balkans. Spectators flouted social distancing norms and thronged the courts; players freely mingled with players, hugged and partied. The world number one along with his wife and many others was tested positive. He has apologized for his sporty transgression. Well, you cannot toss Corona around like the tennis ball even if you are world number one player. The microscopic ball spins and swings with unreturnable fury. 

During the lockdown there has been a notice worthy decrease in patients visiting hospitals with strokes and heart attacks. Are most of our diseases in minds only? Or at least the operational charts of our mind play a great role in defining a lot many physical ailments. Possibly, the slowing down of life helps also. Or maybe people are more aware about health as they get more time for themselves. Of course the air is cleaner as well. Nature is healing around. It will hand over a portion of its healing and happiness back to us. Just that we have to make a habit to recognize these healthy returns and not simply overlook them like we have done for centuries. 

Look at the Corona onslaught, even cancer care gets sidelined. About 70% of cancer patients faced unbreakable hurdles in their treatment. In fact the fear of Corona infection seems to keep many cancer patients away from hospitals. Isn’t everything relative? As of now, people would prefer many of the usual time fatal diseases to Corona.   

Garbage waste seems to comprise only discarded gloves, masks and the PPE kits. Cities are struggling to dispose this new addition to the mountain of trash. These are the jumbled up wrecks as Corona ambushed our ship. The garbage sorters and rag pickers have left cities and gone into the countryside with their tale of woes. They themselves were left like rubbish heap as the administration ran to salvage what could be saved for the front rankers, the people who mattered relatively more. So the garbaged humanity crept like ant trails to their countryside holes. They will of course creep out as hungry bellies seldom allow rest and repose.   

Swami Ramdev almost did a coup against Corona through his press conference announcing the remedy against the devilish virus. Coronil can kill the virus he claimed and at just 545 rupees per month it let loose a wave of triumph among the millions of Indians who actually want to believe him. In the absence of any scientific verification, the government had to politely stop the Baba from advertising his latest ayurvedic concoction. The monsoons arrived a week in advance so people welcomed this opportunity to celebrate this addition to the Baba’s miracle cure. But then to dampen their spirits, diesel stood costlier than patrol, almost a flummoxing situation.

Corona must be playing too much in our minds. The PIA flight that crashed in June killing around 100 people has a Corona connection. Now it emerges that the pilots were stressed up as they discussed the Corona issues in their families. This pandemic preoccupation meant that they failed to land in the first attempt. The aircraft is supposed to be 100% flight-worthy, just that the pilots lost focus. Corona dominated their mind. They were so much worried about the Corona situation at home that many alerts and warnings about over-speed, ground proximity and problems with landing gear were ignored. They tried landing without the landing gear open and the plane engines touched the tarmac.

Corona has claimed prized wickets. The hurtling Indian economy has lost steam. The IMF projects that the Indian economy of 2020 will be almost like that of 2022, means two lost years. Hope the economists will be able to digest this.

Fair and Lovely decides to drop ‘Fair’ from its name. The brand sold its ‘fair dreams’ to darkish Indians for four decades to become India’s largest face care brand. Now it wants to be more inclusive and break social stereotypes and change the age-old norms of beauty. Let’s be ‘Fair’ in our deeds, if not provocatively ‘Fair’ in skin only.

Till the scientists tell us that this is the vaccine, we can say masks, gloves and precautions are the only medicines. If not more, it will raise our awareness levels. We will learn to keep a watch over our careless ways. Or say, all of us are turning more meditative whether we believe it or not. Elsewhere things seem to be going tipsy curvy. There are heat waves, storms, earthquakes and temperatures in Siberia reaching 32 degrees. Now locusts arrive as the dark angels of nature trying to break our ill-footed confidence. A massive locust swarm flew over the Delhi NCR region as the residents ran to shut down windows, banged utensils and played loud music to scare away the pests. The menacing crop-chucking pests, the scary columns of desert locusts, fly during the daytime and settle down to eat away crops and plants at night. They flatten entire fields overnight. They started from the Horn of Africa like Homo sapiens did thousands of years back. They can fly hundreds of kilometers in a day and one km long swarm can chuck out crop food enough to feed 35,000 people in a single night. India sent an advance guard party by supplying 20,000 liters of malathion to Iran to curb their breeding well in advance there so as to stop their march into the Indian territory. Aren’t most of the modern day problems global in nature, so why this infighting? 

Nationalism is getting a boost and multilateralism suffers. Globalization has retreated for the time being. And China is thumping its chest like the super Gorilla to be recognized as a super power.

With hardly any sporting action going on, punters have started putting bets on what else, the most popular ‘Corona’. The illicit betting rings find Corona quite gamey and place wagers on the statistical harvest churned out by Corona statisticians. Legal betting is restricted to horse racing only, and race courses hardly have the capacity to adjust the Himalayan enthusiasm of the punters. Great are the ways of illicit gambling games. Syndicates manage illicit satta markets. There is plenty of stuff to speculate upon like lockdown dates, death toll, infection rate, infection and death count in various cities. It hardly augurs well. It shows we humans will stick to our old ways come whatever may.     

You can very well imagine how horrible the situation in Covid care wards is. After a valiant struggle with their meager resources, both doctors and administrations seem to have given in. People are now just left to fight for themselves. In Hyderabad, a 26-year-old man actually shot his goodbye video moments before death. He is seen gasping for breath and tells that doctors have removed ventilator support. ‘They have removed ventilator and have not been responding to my plea for the last three hours to provide oxygen support. My heart has stopped and only lungs are working,’ this is his message for his father. Moments later he died. From the Covid care facilities in Delhi horrible pictures have emerged like a patient dying unattended in the bathroom and his 14-year-old daughter, also a patient, crying for help. Videos have shown fainted patients lying half on the floor and half on the bed. Doctors pay scanty visits and medicines are handed over from a distance. Dead bodies are not taken out for many hours from the wards.

There is more to dreams than it’s usually acknowledged. Especially the seekers of truth about consciousness know it very well. Sadguru blessed me with his darshan in a dream. I haven't met him in real life, nor have I ever been to Isha foundation. I just listen to Sadguru's talks online now and then. Not as a disciple, but as a curious learner to know more about life and living from an enlightened sage. A sort of tutorial I take it as. But look at my ego construction, I was sitting on the same platform with him and there was some upheavals in the hills in the distance. Sadguru got up, like so many others, to take notice of the event. I kept sitting. Not out of arrogance or being stubborn I am sure. Just that I kept sitting and Sadguru and the rest got back to sitting position. Don't have any clue. I believe in the symbolism of dreams. It has something to do with our subconscious dimension interacting with the super-conscious dimensions.

Plasma therapy holds some promise. The patient who has beaten Covid-19 gets virus antibodies in his blood which is transfused into someone suffering currently. Shouldn’t we remember the lesson of love and compassion taught by all the world religions? If my blood holds the potential to cure you, the goodness in my spirit will surely do good to you also, so remedying one’s self is as good as helping others. At least we ensure that there is one wrong-doer less in the world.

Mr. Kuroki from Japan has been plating flowers for the last two years so that his visually impaired wife would be able to smell thousands of these flowers. The smell makes her smile now. So much for a smile! Well, a genuine full hearted smile’s worth is beyond any monetary sum. Let’s redefine our elements that sum up our meaning in life. The best and most beautiful face is the face that smiles. Smile more! Let me share an anecdote to give you a little smile. It’s raining in Scotland and a dog is sitting in the open outside a store, waiting for its master who has gone inside for shopping. The watchman, Ethan Dearman, walks over to the wet dog and holds his umbrella over it. ‘Well, you never know how dogs feel about the rain,’ he says.

The millions of migrant laborers, who wrote personal histories in reaching their homes alive against all odds, are now ready to undo all of the feat by somehow reaching the spots they had escaped from. They cannot survive without their well of fire anymore. Immediate death is scarier than a bit prolonged one. They can’t survive without the odd jobs that held the baton of life and living for them. It’s never about the basic necessities and two meals a day. To be a human means to be something more than one’s circumstances allow at the moment. So again they are creeping out of their countryside escape holes and taking a beeline for the behemoths they had run away from.

The kindergartens 2020-21 have lost a year. The CBSE has reduced the syllabus of class 10 and 12 by 30 percent. Even without the formal education for a year and half everybody seems as smart and intelligent as before. The kids don’t seem too dull and duffer. It means we aren’t missing too much even with the entire academic session gone void. The modern education system needs a lot to reflect over. 

The WHO is revising its guidelines to include the fact that the virus may be airborne. If not airborne, how can it be so contagious? Now SERO survey—blood testing for the presence of antibodies indicating Covid infection—conducted on random groups says as much as 4 million people in Delhi might have been infected. More importantly, they got well without too much of symptoms. Corona has played more with our minds than our bodies. If the SERUM survey is taken into account, the fatality rate is even lower than 0.2%. In fact, any young Indian faces a bigger risk of dying in a road accident than Corona. The elderly have 1% additional risk of dying in the year with Corona around. It shows that the pandemic plays as much on our minds as it does the body. Of course, we should be bothered about a virus like Corona because it highlights mortality and death pretty bluntly and directly. But equally serious are other more virulent killers like air pollution. In the chronically polluted Indo-Gangetic plains air pollution cuts off 5.2 years from the average age of an Indian.

Well, the human system is still to be known in entirety by the medics. T-cells hold the beacon of hope as per the latest researches. Killer T-cells bestow long-term immunity to be termed as ‘immune warriors’. They terminate infected cells and are born as our response to any kind of viral infection. They are known to possess long-lasting memory against the germs they fought even after decades. Let’s pray for the robust T-cells that remember to swipe away cowardly Corona virus when it happens to attack our body.

Brooks Brothers who dressed 40 US Presidents have filed for bankruptcy. The pandemic has exacerbated their woes by taking debts to unmanageable heights. The Wall Street formalism is dying as workplaces open up to more casual culture. Be prepared for more upheavals. The rate of the occurrence of strange upheavals will go up till a new equilibrium is established between the changed Nature and the modified human body. Don’t panic. It’s the same old buddy ‘change’ driving all this. Just that it is speeded up a bit more during the modern times.   

Rafael landed in India amid much patriotic fanfare. It’s a massive morale booster. All of us Indians feel safer against China now. Imagine 1.3 billion people pinning hope on five metallic birds of war. Well, what can you do if you are unfortunate enough to have a communist regime as your neighbor? With Rafael, we can at least add to our military posturing now. Coming back to the destructive war machines and our mindless expenditure on them. More than any Indo-Chinese human brutality or machine lethality in the Galwan scuffles, the inhospitable nature did the maximum pounding as most of the soldiers from both sides died from hypothermia and low oxygen levels at such high altitudes. Merciless cold waits with a glee as China wears India out and winters creep in.

Gods have at long last been given some respite and vacation as Amarnath Yatra is completed virtually and holy Kaba having just 10,000 well spaced Haj pilgrims. We have given the house of Gods some respite from our continuous haggling and bickering.

August 5 occupies a landmark date in the modern Indian history. The Kashmir problem was left redundant in its old form last year on the same date. This year it goes onto herald a new era. Now it’s clear after long last that there will be a Ram Temple at Ayodhya. PM Modi officiated the bhoomi pujan ceremony at Lord Ram’s birth place. His performance of ceremonial rituals stands out as a ground-breaking event amidst crores of Indians hailing Jai Shri Ram and Jai Siya Ram. The PM prostrated in shastanga dandvata posture on all fours in front of the makeshift sanctum sanctorum. He put earth on his forehead from the foundation marking the beginning of temple construction. Ram Lalla will now have a proper shrine instead of a makeshift tent after 500 years of struggle that dissected the Indian psyche at social, cultural, political and legal levels. As the soil from 2000 pilgrim places across India and water from 100 sacred rivers graces the foundation stone, it culminates almost 30 years of nationalistic mobilization by the party in power in company with its ideological affiliates.

Hope it ushers into peaceful times with progress for all. Now at last they can drop the anchor and stop flailing divisive politics and rule India as one unit.

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Self-preservation is genetically ingrained in our apparently individual consciousness. It's the basic need for the energy, the soul, to keep clinging to the matter, the body; matter being just a transitory phase in the ever-going cyclical surge of energy. The nature of this energy is nothing yet everything at the same time. It’s a self-sustaining ripple, a pulse, a flicker, in the void; a kind of echo, where the echo itself recreates further echoes; a kind of self-generated reverberation.

The apparent matter is nothing but momentary hiatus, a sort of sabbatical, on the path of energy journey when it decides to drop its guard at low frequencies and minimum speed to be visible and give rise to phenomena, shapes, sizes and the consequent interplays at extremely slow pace in comparison to its normal speed, i.e., the speed of light that we have measured so far. This galactic slow-down of the energy floats around in the form of the five primary elements. The first four namely earth, water, fire and air are floating to maintain equilibrium in the fifth element, ether.

Well, this cosmic macroscopic view may sound too intimidating, filling us with this helpless feeling about our inconsequentiality and worthlessness. So let’s come back to our little backyard on planet earth. Returning to the instinct for physical survival, this urge for survival in a particular form has the natural inclination to go overboard and turn into a chronic obsession. As is the natural law, anything beyond a limit is harmful. Too much of nectar is poison and even poison within limits is beneficial and healing. So this tight grip on survival beyond a limit turns counterproductive.

(I)llness is nothing but the sense of ego 'I' gone overboard, a kind of autoimmune syndrome triggered by lopsided consciousness. Its rampant competitiveness and insecurity turns it almost blind, leaving it capable of going against its own organisms that it is supposed to protect. It harms the matter, the body which it presumes to protect. It breeds illness of both body and mind. It in turn leaves its negative imprint on the soul—the core point of consciousness functioning as the bedrock for this body—in the form of painful, suffering account pool of karma, which in turn guides it further as per the potential created by the pool of ingrained memories along the path.

(We)llness is nothing but 'I' diluted and replaced by 'We'. The hard knot of ego melts to give way to get a more proportional consciousness beyond the hard limits of the physical self and its obligations of relentless fight for self preservation. The only way we can check this running down the precipice to self doom is to calm down 'l'—leading to Illness of both body and mind—and nurture 'We'—leading to wellness. It’s a quantum jump on the path of creation from illness to wellness. We are the agents of creation. Just that uncontrolled self-obsession turns us the slayers of the self instead of the creators of something bigger. Life’s meaning is just in actualizing this potential.

Life is what we ‘create’ using the tool of consciousness through the process of living. This is a kind of self generation. It’s not necessary that what we hatch out in our pursuit of our free-will will fit in the normal standardization of achievements, rewards and victories that we see around us. These are simple destinations where many people have felt comfortable in creating their lives around the axis of comfort and common acceptance. But it doesn’t mean that these are the sole parameters to judge and evaluate our lives. Life needs evaluation not judgments. The judgments unjustifiably categorize it as high-low, good-bad, success-failure, etc. This narrow compartmentalization is no justice to the infinite dimensions we are capable of adapting to and recreate new avatars. If we live life by judgments, we cut short our potential as per the standard barometer. It may sound safe, but the outcome is equally mundane. It always leaves us with that persistent nagging feeling that we didn’t kiss the nectar of ultimate freedom, choosing rather to tie the chains of our convenience. In contrast, as a creator, we simply evaluate beyond the scales of moral or ethical judgments. We see life in totality with a smile and carve out our own world where we are the sovereign, ruling as per our own set of laws. This is what we mean by freedom. This is the territory where we may feel at rest, free from that nagging restlessness and incompleteness that usually plagues most of us.

We have the collective platform in the form of genetics born of systematic, generational grooming of consciousness along specified paths. It decides in what shape we come out starting from an invisible couple of cells to a meat of ball to finally this body. We also have the surrounding pool of socio-economic platform among which we open our eyes and learn the basics of life. Genetics and the surroundings where we grow are the kindergarten for us to help us lead to a bigger platform. Unfortunately, most of us grab our doctorates and post-docs from the kindergarten only, completely forgetting that we were supposed to come out of the learner’s stage long ago and be creators.

I know genetics and the surroundings we are born in are beyond our control. These are but just the launching pad. After this what we create in the form of life through well-directed consciousness is always within our hands. It’s suitable to accept our status to be creators. Create life. Don't survive as a creation, accidently pushed and prodded by the collective factors that have given birth to this body and the circumstances around.

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The September heat is killing even in the month’s third week. India has hit 5 million mark of Corona cases with almost 100,000 deaths. This but is the new norm. Nobody is too bothered about the rising figure. We were always expected to be a world leader in this pandemic table. Very soon America will be relieved of its top position which is worse than being at the bottom of any other table at the time. India is matching China in its military posture. Posturing and show of strength is the new form of warfare. Neither side can afford a real war. Posturing and diplomatic and military talks are an integral part of modern warfare. Some chili has been rubbed on Chinese pride as SFF soldiers occupied strategic heights in southern Pangong Tso lake area. Unlike the past, the Indian government hasn’t been secretive about this elite force comprising mainly Tibetan refugees. India has come to realize that there is basically no harm in posturing. But posturing comes at a big cost in monetary terms if not in terms of lives. Both countries are pumping billions of dollars in maintaining full fighting troop strength and equipment in the roughest terrain in the world where temperatures plummet down to minus 50 degree Celsius in winters.   

A lot many (or rather all of them) mechanical and bio-chemical contrivances, in the form of machines, apparatus and many other things of utility, are simply an extension of our capabilities to accomplish things at the material plane. A car is simply an extension of our feet to reach the destination faster. A boat is an enlarged attempt at swimming. Weapons are simply our extended claws and fists to hurt more painfully. A computer is simply an apparatus to calculate, store, memorize, analyze and help our brain. It is a mere appendage to the brain just like many other machines and tools are the appendages to our legs, eyes and hands.

An earth-mover may move a mountain-side and we may not be able to break even a single clod of earth with bare hands, we are still qualified with something extra. The machine doesn’t exist experientially to know and feel that it exists. It’s a closed system. We can quantitatively go on increasing its power and capabilities, but the fundamental barrier between sentient and non-sentient persists to keep it qualitatively different.

The people say that with artificial intelligence this final frontier might be broken. It would be possible for the machines to exist in self-awareness, it’s speculated. It may not be so. You have a heap of stones around. You set masons to work on it and dress the stones in limitless ways and build something architecturally marvelous. But does it change the nature of stone? Is the structure aware of its identity? Same is the case with our rest of creations. Someone may die if the structure crashes down though. The so called AI-stimulated machines of future may crush we humans with their mammoth capabilities but that would be accidental in nature rather than a planned coup by the mankind’s creations.

There is a fundamental difference between what we make and what evolves naturally. Consciousness is the final frontier separating us from our machines. The more the pool of memory to enable a computer to go into the domain of super-computing skills, the more is the realization that it hardly becomes self-conscious. It stays on the path of becoming a larger pool of bits of memory operating across transistors. Its potential is not infinite. It is a closed circuit. Its destiny is planned. It cannot create something beyond the set of memory installed. There is a boundary. And self-consciousness is impossible within a boundary. It may calculate unimaginable things and facilitate things that we cannot even imagine. But it can hardly imagine. It has no free will to define the multi-dimensionality of existence. It cannot dream. It cannot become joyful, cry, feel sad, be ecstatic and get jealous. Can it get excited to make love? Come whatever we may do, it will but stay a machine—bigger though—just like a wheel is a wheel even if it graduated from the stone wheels of the Stone Age to the modern ones. The modern wheel is as much unaware of itself as the stone wheel was thousands of years back. Mere addition in efficiency isn’t consciousness. However, given their super-human capabilities, the AI and its apparatus may spell doom on us, but that would be accidental, not a planned vendetta to bring us down and rule the planet.

There are billions of neurons in our brain that interact through chemical-natured neurotransmitters. These have evolved at the interface of pure energy and matter. There hasn’t been a limit, no pre-set boundary. There are trillions of pathways in which information can be passed on to create infinite experiential possibilities. Being aware of ourselves is just one of them.

Is a stone fundamentally different from the neural fluid in our brain? Yes and no. The structural and molecular arrangement in a stone provides it a rigid identity that contains the seeds of awareness in its most rudimentary form. The stone turns to dust to become soil where bio-signature of life starts in the form of grass, graduating to animals and humans. Human consciousness is thus no abstract entity. It is a drop in the ocean of fellow drops. It’s a leaf on a tree. It’s a part of the whole and has no abstract existence. The moment we talk of an apparatus, we accept an abstraction. A systematically cut off portion from the rest of entire creation. Its destiny is to exist inert as we call it. We humans are a part of the entire set of evolution. Our energy system has the bridges with the whole even with the hard sense of self-awareness. A machine has no such facilitating bridges because it hasn’t evolved. It’s merely a contrivance, a short cut to facilitate some task, a kind of closed system.

The levels of consciousness vary among flora and fauna. Even a stone possesses the level of consciousness that it needs to exist in its particular form and shape. We commit the mistake of evaluating all forms of consciousness using the benchmark of our own consciousness. We have a fluid integrative and ever-expanding picture of things and phenomena through our senses. At least on this planet, it seems the pinnacle of evolution of consciousness. Hence we belittle animals for having raw consciousness and stones for having none.

Artificial Intelligence may not turn out to be catastrophic intentionally—it may bomb out our entire existence in own swipe accidentally though—as many of us may worry about. The real danger will be from within our own minds. The urge to have super-human qualities and capabilities through selective genetic engineering, implanting bio-chips in brains to boost our self-centered design and scheming of life will create a future world where the advantaged and the disadvantaged will be decided by the fact who can afford the new technologies and who cannot. The future world will have two classes, almost different species, of humans: Tech-implanted and simple flesh and blood humans. The latter will occupy a servile category, serving the superior new-breeds because they won’t have any option. The ultimate racism will emerge. The strains of self-consciousness will remain till the last naturally evolved cell—carrying the blueprint of millions of years of natural evolution—stays in the tech-implanted super-species. After that we may have a world of super-machines who won’t be self-aware like we have been.

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In the third week of October, the winters tugged gently at the apron of nights with the navratra festivities around. India and China still talking while bolstering their weaponry and sub-zero winter stay for the troops in the barren desert. US elections and Chinese hegemony now the main topics even though more people are dying and infected with Corona. The world slowly lurches back to the new normal with its old crutches. Not too many lessons learnt. It’s an angrier and more ambitious world. Work from home may be the new normal, at least in the IT sector. Schooling and higher education is severely jolted and they are still trying to salvage the semester instead of making it a zero academic year that would have been more convenient.

The numero uno international traveler broke the record for the longest non-stop flight ever recorded. All of 300 grams, the Bar-tailed Godwit flew non-stop from Alaska to New Zealand, covering 12,220 Kms in less than two weeks, his enthusiasm for flying boosted by the easterly winds. The record is official as it was tracked with 5 gm of satellite tag on it. From the Alaskan mudflats it shrunk its organs to fly light. He surpassed the previous recorded feat of a female Godwit. Her record of 11,500 Km stood for 13 years. Nature has designed him like a sleek Jet fighter having pointed, long wings. To the indigenous Maori people he is a harbinger of good luck and spring. Here he would enjoy till March before taking the journey back.    

Laughing doves chuckle cutely, hence named so. It’s endearing to have a laughing, rolling and yodeling call. But just like a comedian’s pain in the heart is always preceded by the rib-tickling laughter masking the facial features, a laughing dove’s cry also gets covered up by the rib-tickling sounding chuckle of theirs. Its sobbing, suffering cry still comes out as funnily rolling notes of a birdie chuckle. The pain camouflaged by vocal chords has both advantages and disadvantages. It saves you from mockery but at the same time robs you of sympathy that may still be there in some corner.

An eagle is for the aggressive majesty of power, domination and hunting. It looks majestic with its killer’s instinct, equipped with a hawk eye, hooked beak and razor-sharp talons. A dove is for peace. It’s a symbol of live and let live. It looks lovely with its innocent eyes, graceful walk and stoic demeanor. The eagle is for stealth and strength. The dove is for benevolent, peaceful and an unassumed life and living without much ripples on the canvas of existence. The eagle shrieks almost with a war cry. The dove coos for peace. As the two sides of the same coin of creation, they paint the picture of existence in their own ways, one as important as the other.

The laughing dove is seen, as usual, on its customary perch point on a rusted wire loop jutting out of the corner of a two storey house. His call is insistent and non-stop from dawn to dusk for the last few days. The irony is: Even if a laughing dove is crying, it sounds like laughing. To those who don’t know his story, and there aren’t many who would have the time and inclination to be interested in the affairs of a dove, it is a mere love-bound chuckling laughter of the laughing dove. I but hear the pain of loss buried behind his insistent chuckle. He has lost his partner. Laughing doves are monogamous by the way. Like all monogamous birds, the loss of a partner is incalculable and many perish in the wake of their spouse’s death. The way he is mourning from dawn to dusk, I suppose he may not survive as well.

He seems determined to starve himself to death. I have seen him just once taking littlest mournful beak bites on the ground, the very same ground where they walked in lovely majesty, picking out grass seeds and tiny insects when she was alive. Now he finds everything almost distasteful.

A sparrow couple was almost fruitlessly trying to put the foundational sinews on a very narrow edge of the wooden rafter in the cattle barn. Feeling their plight, I fixed a cardboard box on a not-in-use rusted ceiling fan. It just hung there as a cobwebbed chandelier of the cattle world with its connection wire broken. However, there were no birdie takers for the beautiful nesting house that stayed mournfully inviting and empty. There seems to be some natural intelligence at work. The birds have seen so many ceiling fans whirring death, doom and destruction to the feathered lives. So they shirked from taking the offer. Then the dove couple, egged on by their simplicity, made use of it. They put the first dry twigs not inside but outside on it to fructify my attempt at helping bird nesting after almost three years.  

The nest was—it is still there with the fossilized seal of their love in it—a very flimsy platform of dry twigs of neem   branches. Marking their lovely milestone in their love story, she laid two eggs. On the path of creation, there are pulls to destruction at all points. Then the mankind’s simian cousin came as a challenger to the forces of creation from the side of destruction. He climbed onto the barn ceiling, hang down like an expert acrobat with one hand from the iron grater and plucked away the booty, one egg. I reached on time and came within the fraction of a second to turn his bum redder with a strike. He escaped unscathed. I checked and found one fresh hatchling lying there as a tiny ball of winged prospects. As long as there is some semblance of encouragement in the nest to propel their paternal instincts, the loss hardly matter to them and they keep the routine feeding and customary watch over the predators. I have heard that the nesting adults even feign injury to distract and draw away predators from the nest.

How should a laughing dove change the amplitude of its yodeling notes to turn it into a mourning call instead of a customary chuckle? His call is the same like before. He sounds like wooing a female even though he is mourning the death of his life partner. But my knowledge of his loss turns me aware of the pain carried by these notes. He has the unwavering spirit to mourn and cry till eternity. I have the heart to feel his pain. His pain doesn’t go unacknowledged at least.

The mourner had once fallen in love. His cooing calls were reciprocated by her, the one who is gone now. Attractive was his courtship display. His adolescent wings catapulted him into the lofty spheres of love, lust and procreation. He launched his infatuated self into the air with his wing clapping, making romantic, charged sounds and majestically glided down in a gentle arc to display his youth and coming of age. He was very emphatic and impressive in his display of masculinity. The crazy lover followed her with his head bobbing accompanied with seductive cooing. And all this blizzard of passion still sounded funny because from both extremes of pleasure and pain a laughing dove has the same means to voice his emotions, his cuddly laughing cooing.

Emboldened by her attention, he started pecking his folded wings in ‘displacement-preening’ to solicit her surrender to the physical manifestation of love. She accepted by crouching and begging for food, a gentle prelude to her acceptance of him as her chicks’ Pa and a provider of safety and companionship. With abounding passion he indulged in courtship feeding before conjugal ride and the beginning of a monogamous matrimony. They preened each other. They made a fantastic pair of long-tailed pigeons with rufous and black chequered necklace. Their chuckling calls, a low rolling croo-doo-doo-doo-doo involving a fluctuating amplitude, vibrated on the airy canvas for love and procreation. In their corner of the cosmos, they germinated a soft ripple of pining love and robust care. He as a possessive, jealous fellow won’t allow her to go too far. If she foraged far, his cooing cascaded to her ears, tying her with the invisible cord of his attention and insecurity, forcing her lilac tinged neck and head to turn in his direction and she would whoop down to be with him. Cutely they walked on the ground and ate grass seeds and other vegetable matter and tiny ground insects like ants, termites and beetles. Docile and fairly terrestrial, they foraged on the ground, their reddish legs giving them the gentlest of steppings. In contrast, they took flight with a lot of noise followed by their swift and straight flight with regular beats of wings and an occasional sharp flick of the wings. All this and more wrote a beautiful chapter in romance.

They looked almost similar in appearance save his slightly bigger size and his pinkish-brown under-side slightly colorful to her paler one. His bluish grey band on the wing was bigger than her’s. These are the features that helped me in recognizing him as the surviving mourner.

A few days back, I found the chick had died. It was a mere dried whitish tiny tissue lying in the nest. It but still kept them bound to the duties and they hovered around, walking gracefully in the courtyard around the flower beds and plants to get their breakfast, lunch and pre-dusk dinner. The two of them were always together. Inseparable. The rest of the world loses its significance if a pair in love has their world full within themselves. It made such a beautiful sight of a love-smashed bird pair.

As a birdwatcher the sight of a new bird in the area is very assuring and alluring. Four days back, the sight of an eagle on a nearby keekar pretty much excited me. The eagles are rare now, hardly seen within the village boundaries. It’s a majestic powerful bird, the sign of aggression and plays on the front-foot with assurance and confidence. I knew an eagle has no mission other than hunting. But even this knowledge cannot stop you from watching it with an appreciating eye. He looks regal. Royalty always has had claws hidden beneath the regal attire and extravagant show on the surface. No wonder he looked a veritable King of the birdie world. An eagle can afford to be restful on a tree. He appeared perched up stoically almost with a carefree air. It was business as usual. Even the cantankerous crows didn’t bother too much over his transgression into their territory.

The doves with the dead dry chick in their nest walked as gracefully in the yard as before to welcome a fresh day in their winged life. Cutting the cool early morning air with his talons he swooped down and killed her. The yard was empty, so he didn’t feel in a hurry to fly away with the prey. He ate her right there. She was now just a scattered bloodied lump of wings and feathers. Her lover just could shriek in anger and pain in his laughing notes.

Her memories continue to reverberate through his fur and he is tirelessly cooing from all the perch points that bear the smell of their love as if to woo her out of death. He thinks she has ditched him and taken a new paramour. He is confident of his cooing display and thinks he can win her back. So he continues his painful laughing notes, his heart bruised and his masculinity embittered. Little does he realize that she has gone onto be a part of her hunter. She is no longer that docile bird of peace. She is reshaped as the steely nerves and power of talons to hunt now and not just get hunted down like before. 

He cries with the passion with which he had once wooed her to make her a part of himself and turn himself a part of her. Now a part of him has vanished. It is painful to see him survive as a fraction of himself. He may not survive as a monogamous bird. I but wish that some female, who has just come of age or has been unlucky like him to lose her partner and is ready to accept a mate now, takes his crying coos as the teasing cooing of a challenging male who is trying to break the folds of feminine inhibitions and hesitation. 

As I would know after ten days, even crying in a laughing tone has its advantages. Its pain did not go waste. Its bereavement cries—which of course came out as its laughing notes—were taken as a wooing adventure by a freshly coming of age female. I saw him walking in all majesty with his new bride in the yard picking grass seeds and insects. There was ceremonial begging of food by her and they displayed an amazing spell of pecking coquettishly at each other’s checkered throat. The afternoon sun in the last week of October shone upon them in all glory. The autumnal air sang of coming cold. The bride was young and sleek.

They are monogamous provided the partners survive. But in case one them dies, their cries through laughing notes helps them in resetting the matrimonial stage once again.          

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The end of October saw the coldest recorded night for the month in the last 58 years. The minimum temperature hit 12 degrees Celsius. The virus is getting bold again with the rising cold. The start of November saw stubble burning and the resultant smog on northern Indian plains. It feels like living in a gas chamber. Almost anyone can expect any type of illness at any stage of life. Health is no longer a normal, fighting to stay somehow alive is. Earlier during the pre-dawn you came across hardly anyone on an early morning walk. Now the dark pathways across the farm fields are littered with people who jog, hop, walk and slog to survive in the smog. You see people of all categories in the struggle. It was a city phenomenon, this type of walks and all. The countryside automatically qualified one for good health at least till one got into her fifties. Now farmers in their twenties are getting heart attacks, laborers in their thirties are getting diabetes and people in forties getting cancer in the villages. So basically there is a struggle for survival.    

The trees stand covered with dust, soot and smog. You can feel the pollutants burning your eyes. The average age has been cut by 6 years in north India by pollution. Yamuna is once again a filthy drain with chemical foams swimming past with a stern warning to stay away. It is the same world in a worse form.   

There is a second and third wave in many European countries and the US. The lockdown series may commence. The US is getting around 100,000 cases/day again. Biden and Trump are sparring in the voting arena for November 3 election. Then Biden outbid Trump to acquire the top throne of the world. Trump was but a very bad loser and was stubborn in letting go off the top-post even after clearly getting defeated.   

Beyond big happenings to bigger people in the world, a tiny night-bloom of Parijat  swings in the lap of the day-bloom of Hibiscus in my garden. A flower is cradling another flower! And the air carries the songs and smells of ecstasy. Saturated with beauty and joy, it allows the air to kiss its petals and softly gyrates to the kisser's divine touch.

The smaller the virtual world in one's brain, the bigger, more substantial and joyful will be her standing in the real world. But virtual is what is running this world presently. The invisible, psychological world is far, far bigger, intricate, vague, puzzling and complicated than the physical one. From the highest bodies in the world to silly time-pass among teenagers, everything has gone virtual. It is a flimsy world now. Well packaged lies—with their social media platforms—are far more effective in running this world and managing relations than poorly packaged truth.

Someone may not be as bad as he appears, provided we are as good as we think ourselves to be. But then we are a very poor observer of our own self. Consequently, we are the worst judge of our own self.

The Islamic world is in turmoil. China is up to its typical tricks to grab the ruling hot seat to manage the globe as per its own ideology. It is an angrier world than ever. Cold war has seeped into geostrategic affairs. Simple mathematics: Peace on earth is directly proportional to reforms in Islamic societies, democracy in China and a multi polar world.

Liberal, democratic and secular values of France have been challenged. Islamic zealots are vying hard to drag it into gutters with their radicalized beliefs. A teacher who had shown Charli Habdo cartoons to his pupils was beheaded by a blood-seeking Muslim terrorist. Later some more people were brutally killed with knife in a church. The French president is under fire from the Islamic world that is baying for his blood for trying to retain the secular and democratic character of his country. Three bad boys are heaving the paranoid fears among the Muslim populace world over: Turkish president Erdogan, Pakistani PM Imran Khan and Malaysian president Mahatir Muhammad. Erdogan wants to become a calipha of the modern Islamic world by undoing all the reforms that Ataturk had undertaken almost 100 years back and turn it into a neo-Ottoman empire of medieval Muslim glory. He is putting his foot in all the surrounding confrontations and turn the scene bloodier. The other two are poor opportunists who are riding the bandwagon of Islamic cause. Strange that all three can ignore the plight of the millions of Muslims held by their goatee and their skull caps trampled under the PLA boots in Xinjiang.   

Tiny seeds to saplings to plants, and now on the path to be trees. My ego construct gives the illusion that they are my trees. But they belong as much to an ant, a bird and squirrel as they do to me. I am simply connected to them. They were once almost invisible specks on my palm, the matter with the potential. This matter depended on the iota of consciousness in me to trigger a process. Or rather, the seeds chose me for their actualization. I very well remember how the little soot pierced earth to give a baby smile to father sun. Their baby innocence is their force. It binds you to serve, nurture and protect them. It sucks you in the creative process of their growth. From tiny seeds on my palm to little saplings in poly bags to rapidly growing plants to become trees, it gives me an immense joy in being part of a creative process. It's atonement for individual sins also. Modern lifestyle is a blot on mother earth as all of us unleash pollutants into nature. Individually we have a big carbon footprint. My vehicle puffs out poisonous smoke. I use soaps and chemicals that must be polluting mother earth. All the personal and collective facilities that I use have a negative impact on the environment. I am aware of my carbon footprint and try to undo it by planting trees and help them grow. Every monsoon season, district administration goes hypothetically crazy in India and plants millions of saplings every year to convince their conscience as well as bosses that they have done their duties. Unfortunately, not even one percent of these baby plants survive because there is no follow up care after that. They just wither away. Despite pumping so much of money in the plantation drive, environment remains the same, but our conscience turns cleaner though for paying lip service to the cause of environment. A little plant is like a baby. It's at your mercy for survival because the natural factors have turned against it due to our infringement against nature. It needs support, care, water and loads of love. It's better to plant a few saplings and take proper care rather than plant thousands and forget them and leave them to die.

Thank God life is not just a smooth road, taking us uninterestingly to a boring, plain destination! Guys be thankful that it is pot-holed and bumpy. The vehicle of our life gets jolts and jerks which are in fact the lifelines for our material being. It tests the vehicle of our being. The latter responds and this see-saw battle releases energy for the engine of our survival. So guys if your road appears bumpier than others, just feel the sea-storm of energy your system is creating not just for your own survival but for the common cause of creation and survival at the universal level as well. As a struggler you contribute far more to a great unseen cause than it appears on the common plain of our material existence. Love your flailing of arms in the dust to come out to a clear point!

In Rajasthan the sweet-sour skirmishes between Congress and the BJP saw the Dushera Ravan being sent to jail. The authorities denied permission for the effigy to be burnt and the police confiscated it to get it to the jail premises. The opposition then fought to get Ravana out of jail.

The winters now arrive with a new challenge, smog. The entire Delhi NCR reels under smog born of farm fires, vehicular exhausts, construction dust and factory smoke. We feel blessed if the wind disperses the pollutants, allowing us a bit of tolerable spell. We are airy fish, aren’t we? Just like fish can’t survive without their water, we are doomed if the airy sea in which we swim with our ambitions gets spoilt beyond a point. To be able to see a clear sky in winters looks a blessing now. We pray for winds now. The airy fans that help unleash wind to save us, trees, are becoming a relic. The future is surely scary.

The rock of truce, Shanti Shila, has been exposed. It can no longer be an all-out blindly competitive world fuelled by unchecked ambitions and rampant greed. We have to agree to cooperate on some basics. All of us need to survive like the animals in a drought hit forest agree to cut down their animosity around the last drops in a pool of water. It helps them to survive for the days when rains will regenerate the pools again.

Azim Premji, the man with a mocking smile, hawkish piercing gaze and comic moustache, spends Rs 22 crore per day in philanthropy. It’s beyond fame or redemption. It’s simply driven by a sense of doing the right thing. His total endowments to the charitable cause have crossed Rs 150,000 crore mark with more on the way. He has already donated 93% of his shares to his charitable foundation. Moreover, for half a century he has ethically steered a conglomerate now famous for principled business. The mammoth size of his benevolence shines like a lone star among the ill-famed, tight-fisted Indian billionaire club. India is a lowly placed 82nd entry in a list of 128 countries for generosity as per the ratings of CAF World Giving Index. As the famished migrant workers slogged on foot with empty bellies during the pandemic, the illustrious club of 117 Indian billionaires, with the noted exception of Azim Premji, hardly had a pinprick at their conscience to do something for the deprived and the hungry. The seeds of charity and kindness were sown long time back in his childhood, looking at her mother doing selfless service to the paralyzed children at a children’s orthopedic hospital in Bombay.      

We love Diwali but each and every celebratory exultation comes with a huge plume of smoke adding to the gloom as firecrackers that we bust for the good actually bang from the side of the evil. As if we hadn’t enough problems, the Diwali celebrations unleashed huge plumes of firecracker smoke. The eyes burnt. Thank God, the next day we had some wind and the smog drifted away.

Trillions of this virus would weigh just one teaspoon, but imagine it would put all of us in such a crazy soup. There seemed something serious about China. While the rest of the world called it the Wuhan virus, they innovated another crudity and called it the India virus. The Chinese uttered with their megaphone rhetoric that this virus trail started from India during the heat wave of July August 2019 when animals and humans shared the same water bodies.   

As a chilly December crept in, the UK became the first to clear Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Russia and China have already cleared vaccines for general use. Moderna also applied for emergency-use authorization for use in America and Europe. 

The talks of vaccination have beaten all gossips in their intensity. The ICMR maintained that it was not necessary to vaccinate the entire population; rather inoculating a critical mass would be enough to break the galloping chain of reaction. The government plans to inoculate about 30 crore priority population including frontline healthcare workers, elderly people and those carrying co-morbidities.

On December 2, the UK became the first country to permit Pfizer vaccine to the priority group of elderly over 80 years in age and frontline healthcare workers. It’s a leapfrogging over rigorous scientific evaluation and analysis for safety, quality and effectiveness that normally takes years. But the process here was pushed into a narrow timeframe of few months and trial and sampling also jotted at the minimum.

The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is a two-dose vaccination needing Antarctic temperatures for storage. It has high success rate. India but has to be realistic about the minus 70 degree storage requirement of the vaccine of the first world. We are a developing country and can do with lesser quality. India has put its bet on AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine that is far cheaper and can be stores at 2 to 6 degrees of temperatures. The masses cannot go for the classes. It’s all about vaccines and vaccination endeavors as of now. Universal vaccination appears to be the only solution with a foolproof tested vaccine, but that seems a wishful thinking as of now. The reality is far to undulating to be layered as a smooth tarred road. Countries like India can only think of vaccinating a part of their population with cheaper affordable vaccine to break the chain of rampaging infections. We are still looking to give a sufficient counterpunch to this bug that has been terribly debilitating to our mind, body, spirits and the world order we had strived so hard to forge.

Russia also started vaccinating its population with its Sputnik V vaccine. 

To allay the apprehensions of masses about the vaccine and undo the skeptical strains, so as to persuade them to go for the inoculations, three of the four surviving US presidents (Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barak Obama, with no word about Jimmy Carter the oldest among them) offered to take Covid-19 shots publicly. Nice advertisements of the pharmaceutical giants who have taken a lead in producing the vaccine.

On December 8, Margaret Keenan, 90, became the first UK citizen to be inoculated with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

Australia was forced to abandon a $750 million project for a locally produced Corona vaccine because the inoculation during the trial phase produced false HIV positive tests among the recipients of the vaccine. Sanofali GlaxoSmithKline had to delay their vaccine candidate launch because there were concerns about its efficacy for the older people. Pfizer meanwhile got a nod for vaccination in the US.

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