Catching on with life again

 The primeval darkness of human-centric desire defines our life as one straight, unrelenting juggernaut against the forces of nature. It churns out fantastic loops of economy, nations, religions, dreams and destiny. Corona forces a lockdown. No wonder Homo sapiens felt persecuted. Life under the protecting shed meant millions of dollars lost per hour as the massively factorized nations came to a grinding halt. Even as a struggling developing country India chose to stop in the middle of the track to save lives, while many first world countries were hesitant to stop, afraid of losing their economic grip on precarious statistics. A note of thanks to PM Modi appeared fitting and justified for taking the brave step. Sometimes it helps win the war if one chooses to duck and run for cover and allow the battle to be lost. Lord Krishna, ranchhod, did the same to ultimately win.

When you put money, and the rest of its resultant materialistic derivatives, above everything else, and make it the axis of human existence, like Western countries have done since centuries, you get big economic statistics to give you a false sense of security. But does it bring joy, peace and harmony in its wake? It hardly does as you can surmise from the exponential growth of human sufferings alongside the economic growth. The irony is, monetary figures are mind creations, and are hardly effective in fighting against the consequences of the overblown money-making process. They create a smoke-screen of development and progress, turning us blind to the real plights. The causes stand hidden in the natural, biological cauldron. To succeed against the same, you have to prioritize human life over economy because humans make money not vice versa. So while Trump found economic depression worse than the prospects of mass deaths due to Corona and hence was still spending much of his energies in creating economic solutions, PM Modi humanely abandoned all talks of moneymaking at this juncture. The unprecedented lockdown of the country came as a proof of the eastern humanist values of putting human lives above money. This pause had the potential to make India a world leader, a shining example of being a progressive, kind and considerate society.

We are a massive society. The challenge was unprecedented. But when your leader abandons all secondary priorities and spends sleepless nights to save lives, in plain and simple terms without any political and economic compulsions, the success is inevitable. Salutes PM Modi! This economically unthinkable—at least in the Western terms—step of putting up a pause will reinvigorate India and make it healthy to an extent that the rest of the world will look towards it for inspiration in future. Thank you PM so much! It's an honor to have voted for you! It feels like my vote carries a value worth millions of dollars!

As individuals also we have our clumsy trails of being careless. It’s high time that we take the onus and do our bit. A simple means of undoing our dirty part in the overall plunder is to calculate our equation of farting and planting trees.

Well, every time we offend the modesty of the air around our bum, stealthily (as majority of us do) or unabashedly (like some of us do), both deriving sadistic pleasure in their silent and violent ways respectively, run to the nearest tree and hug it for it is a mute, uncomplaining spectator, a sort of sufferer but still diligently doing its duty of a purifier of our misdeeds. Right from our apparently innocuous farts to the Himalayan gas emissions by the airplane darts, we leave a trail of exhausts that leaves Mother Nature stunned. So don’t expect that it won’t grimace with irritation. Farting should remind us of our well esteemed primary status of being a pollutant. So hug the tree and say sorry. It may still be scared of us as we hug it, fearing a still more grotesque version of our blast, the blast of our ego and greed that manifests so often in mass slaying of trees. CHOP CHOP CHOP! So my dear little pollutant, plant more trees. One tree per fart will be asking for too much because we have to accomplish our planet-taming endeavors also and still have to tame other planets in the solar system. But I think, one tree for 100 farts will absolve us of our crimes. We will carry better conscience also, I tell you. So fart more, dart more, but take the message of planting tree to every door!

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Our ship rocked by the unseen viral bombs and our normalcy falling like sitting ducks to the enemy moving briskly and stubbornly. The lockdown weeks rolled in with painstaking austerity. The viral puzzle was twisted like the most puzzling helix of incomprehensible conception. Even the hope of any possible cure was beyond imagination to enliven and vivify the sagging spirits. The humanity was stuck up at an impassable, unfordable interregnum. The upheavals shook all nook corners of the world. Our medicinal counter vollies to little avail. We simply entrusted our joint fate to the generosity of the scientists who must have been profusely perspiring under their coats in the research labs. As the coming times would tell, it was no philanthropic enthusiasm that drove the vaccine research; instead it was the same old oppressive zeal of making profits from vaccine sales out of the collective miseries that drove the research engine. The steel that we prided ourselves with turned out to be clay vessel. All we could do was to salvage traces of life and living from the little set of permissible choices during the Corona War.

With India locked up, and dirty boy Corona doing the rounds out there in the streets to catch any gallant humans outside, a new generation was to be unleashed onto our demography as bored, scared and desperate couples used their unspent energies through forgetting and forgiving dives into the pools of physical intimacy. Demographic statisticians must have been waiting with bated breaths, scared with the added workload waiting in the wings, at the possible surge in the population growth curve. To the hell with Corona waging a war from the side of mortality! We Indians are the valiant foot soldiers of the goddess of fertility and procreation. With back-breaking fight for economic survival being suspended, we went all out into procreation to tilt the scale in favor of creation against the forces of destruction. Idiotic Corona peeking through the windows must have surely lost heart.

Joyously estranged couples, absorbed in their own freedoms while somehow maintaining the decorum, tidiness and modesty of their matrimonial innings well proportioned on the surface for the people to see, finally got some respite from the path of ambition that kept their marriages almost in the namesake mode. They slunk into couches with a torrid rapidity, abandoning the gloomy monosyllables of their highbred elegance, and allowed themselves to be normal husband and wife finally. For a change, it was not the same beastly competitive world. They could relax their steely nerves. The Goddess of fertility watched with gladdening gratitude and gratefully showered ceremonious fruits. The celeb couples would pay the parental penalty for that pleasant perfidiousness. Ambitious career women pursuing the path of robust self-reliance, who took motherhood merely as a repugnant reproduction sparring with their independent spirit, accepted the seed in their wombs with a pliant, soft spirit needed to nurture a tiny sapling on the fertile soil. In the armistice ambience, the issue of conception lost its bestial ugliness. The artistic balustrades, window ledges and vestibules hummed to the vacillating dissipations of surging and receding passions and egos. Honest words and true kisses would dole out profoundest amiabilities. The hitherto unsurpassable litter born of many a poignant melodrama would be blown off its moorings by the see-saw subtleties, aromatic juiciness and assiduous sensuality of the just regained chemistry. Life that was merely a restlessly stuttering strategy with its painstaking, pinching gist would turn smoothly sonorous. Smiling reminiscences would surface from the untold depths to which these had been buried and light up the long-delayed conjugal bed with their mythic luminosity. Time would stand in gay verdure. Under the enticing ogle of love, luxuriance would go all malleable. The moments would be hung with voluptuous languor. The primordial paradise would momentarily blossom out with the orgasmic flood swashing away melted egos. The world of magical enchantment brimming with stars born of the subtle rearranging of male into female and the vice versa. Out of the unconstrained surrender and panting proclamation of the resinous and sonorous moments, under the crooning incantations and triumphant acclamations by the goddess of human breed, many a star kids would be born.  

Shut your mouth, you humming, loquacious and talkative virus! Be ashamed of your perilous penchant for destruction! The moaning moments of our stupendous proliferation will make you feel ashamed of your destructive potential. With your sinister ease you are sprawling ungainly around. But you cannot match our penchant for self-oblivious furlough. We have the onus of keeping creation ahead of destruction. An entire new generation will crop up, sired out of fear, boredom and desperation, the Corona time brats. They are sure to have congenital immunity against the deadly virus. The fight in the bedrooms will take two courses. The couples who have been waging wars against each other like the worst enemies on earth will fall into bed after calling a ceasefire. The best lovebirds, who have been the apple of each other’s eyes since decades or even months, will fall down on the floor with an all out scratching of each other’s hair like wild cats fighting to save the universe. To disappoint master Corona, both these courses will have the same result, addition to the stock of Homo sapiens, the Corona-resistant generation. So when the sun  will smile warmly again after the frigid night, and the air will be free of Corona scare, many a lady will have motherly compassionate smile on their lips as they walk a bit more carefully while rolling their hands softly on their elevated tummies. Look forward to better times, man! Keep Hope!

Meanwhile, with the passage of days, the churlish, torrid, spiteful and ugly Corona turned regally swift and high-flying. It looked to have been wittily sprinkled in our eyes to make us wince with pain, eyes shut off tightly, while the sprinkler stood watching with a cannonading glee. In its artificially tempered genome sequence many cunning subtleties were twisted, turned and wrinkled to dupe any maneuver by the scientists to breach its fort. The Corona scare, piteously plain it its intonation, now penetrated deep in the countryside. It scribbled cascading jottings of smashed dreams and beaten hopes.

The village saloon-keeper, a very nice friend of mine by the way, has a very adventurist brother. Just like anyone around might draw every ounce of capability and cunningness to fulfill the basic needs of life, he too has been putting up every effort to board a flight to be away in a different country or region to, primarily, nurture a sense of being a businessman even if hypothetically, and, secondarily, to have a bit, o sorry a lot, of fun. So New York is no better than Timbuktu to him. Lo, here he landed up in the sleepy village from Bangkok. As most of we Indians are expert at, he did a roundabout to dodge the little trouble of staying isolated officially for 14 days, only to come across the bigger trouble of gifting cough and sneezing from the exotic land. Many of our countrymen were using all expertise of our calculating, cunning persona to avoid 14 Day quarantine, believing that it cannot happen to me, and then walk into a bigger quagmire, not just for ourselves but for many others also. We love sharing! Don’t we?

Following the path of hard endurance in international business, he moved around his family and mixed with his social circle in the village, drinking wine with his pals and telling tales of the latest adventure. By the time the healthcare workers arrived to take a stock of the situation, his brother, the saloon keeper, had shaved the chins of almost half of the village. An angry, scowling, shrugging and gesticulating team of administrators put their under quarantine. Carrying an inelegant intonation of fear and warning, a paper was slapped over the nameplate as a sort of punishment. Their entire identity looked hijacked by the floating glory of the virus through the little piece of paper.

Now imprisoned along with his huge joint family totaling half a dozen people in a small house, my friend, the saloon keeper, sounded supermassively angry. His jesting idioms and humorous exertions, which he used quite efficiently while plucking out hair from nostrils and plying his razor over many a throat thus allaying their primal fear that he may cut them then and there, was no longer sufficient to cover his Corona status. ‘Everyone thinks we are in traitor-kind deal with the enemy Corona. Everybody is avoiding our eyes. They just shout from outside “How are you” without coming inside,’ he was furious. Well, what did he expect? Did he expect them to come and embrace them? With Corona scarier than even death, it was a wishful thinking on his part. Well, it was advisable to keep his socializing expectations a bit low till the culmination of the mandatory 14 days quarantine period and the arrival of the reports. Till then all those who had visited his saloon were waiting like their own reports were to be released soon. People were no longer as dismissive of the pandemic like they sounded earlier when the scary reports from the distant parts started arriving. This is a very tiny planet, you should always remember! If the technological advancement gives us great reach in pleasures, it gives equal, or even more, reach to collective miseries to rush to distant most corners of the planet.

During the fateful period, with me being ignorant of the gallant boy’s return from exciting Bangkok, I remember having gone for a long, long evening walk with my saloon-keeper friend. In the countryside, the child buddies share a special bond. We still prefer to walk with hands on each other’s shoulder, like two bulls yoked to pull a plough. It’s taken as a sign of real friendship. Now, like a sullen monkey, I had an unseemly mental critique of the outdated signs and symbolisms of the childhood countryside friendships. In fear we easily turn soulless and selfish. Friendship appear a puny ‘milk and water’, something feeble and sentimental that could give you, at the most, Corona. So the incident has spoiled my mood a bit. It spoiled the temper of all those who had got themselves shaved at his saloon. With their Corona-hyphenated identity, they got segregated and dumped at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

The childhood tales in the villages are often well sliced and pickled. Every moment of those times was protuberant and pregnant with mischief. Ours was a skirmishing platoon marching with exasperating curiosity. The spirits doused in irresistible drowsiness we gave the monkeys a run for their money with our ever-unspooling pranks. These would often turn into the horrible infamies of quarrels. I had thrashed him once during one such indecorous incident. ‘If you get Corona, I will thrash you again!’ I baulked at him over phone. ‘And if I don’t, then?’ he was on back foot, as if he had committed a crime. ‘Then you will be lucky to retain friendship. But no longer shoulder-to-shoulder child-buddy strolls anymore. We are graying middle-aged men now!’ I still appeared aggrieved and in no mood to spare the poor fellow.

Everyone looked living damnably and dangerously under the violent caresses of the virus tentacles. The time moved on listlessly and languidly. The armchair theorists, the querulous hirelings of hatred, took pinchfuls of their ideologies and concepts from the snuff-box and took pot-shots at their imagined enemies whom they condemned as the culprits behind the suffering. The colossal vice of animosity exists in our minds only. We just need someone to project the languishing myth of our own misery on his persona.

My hair grew like that of a mendicant friar. ‘We will use a trimmer to give an amateur bald cut to each other,’ I proposed to my younger brother. He has a glint of mischief and immediately agrees. I smell the mischief in his eyes. Corona scare gives you extra sensitivity. ‘No, no you will run away before your turn comes up after making me funnily furrowed baldie!’ I read his intentions very well. ‘So I will give you a bald cut first to avoid this,’ I propose. I am serious. ‘And what if you run away after giving me the funniest bald furrows on my head?’ he has an inkling of my mischief also. My Corona scared brain works out a solution for the emergency. ‘You have your trimmer, I have mine. We will call two people and ask them to start putting balding furrows at the stroke of zero second, like they start a 100 meter race with a bang.’ He agreed to the suggestion. So during the lockdown at least the haircutting problem seemed to be resolved.

My mother had a special liking for this brown and white female street dog. It’s a demure, docile dog with peace and contentment looming very-very largely in its dull grey eyes. It possesses an incredible discretion for peace. Shoved by the kindly brightness of her soul, Ma would even chase away other dogs to feed this backbencher, who stood meekly at the end of the group. The tradition has been kept alive by us to specially give chapattis to this silent, stoic canine spirit. To test our temperament, another dog of exactly same appearance arrived on the scene and started to enjoy the perks and benefits of looking like our preferred dog. My niece appeared disturbed over this fact. The poor dog went empty stomach from our threshold a few times. It was very disturbing. With the Corona jolt, I seemed to have turned very mean and scheming. ‘I will pour some black oil on the rascal’s smooth coat to demarcate it and spoil its camouflage!’ I was determined. See, what Corona was doing to even those who grew up assuming themselves to be decent human beings. I got worried that by the end of the war against Corona, I may emerge a full rascal ready to take on the world.

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I have been a potent minimalist with life as far as enjoyment of the sweet torpor of mundane stuff is concerned. Under the lockdown, however, the earlier status looked extravagant in comparison to the cramped individual as well as collective world around. Nonetheless, soldier uncle's badminton hops to shuttle away Corona tried to make it appear a normal world. Corona Corona everywhere! Marona Marona echoing from the opposite horizon as everybody seemed plagued by self doubts! It was cloudy and pretty cool for this time of late March. Retrospectively, with myriad cross-references of memories shooting off into the implacable galaxy of an uncertain future, I am doing rounds in my courtyard to collate and crystallize some suitable meaning of life that may subdue the dull throbbing of restlessness that all of us possess irrespective of our position, wealth, achievements, power and perks. The well-oiled machine of random thoughts cascades across the vast neural network in my apprehensive brain. To typify that it’s only human-centric misery only, the flowers smile and plants give an assurance that not everything is lost. Getting bored has never been my cup of tea. I am confident of spending 10 years in isolation at the tiniest island in the remotest seas, provided I have at least 1000 big books and get one frugal meal a day. But then collective humongous waves of the united yawns of boredom of the humanity locked up in their houses reach me and turn me a bit restless like an old frog that moves, at long last, a bit from its hibernation and looks with suspicion and sadness around.

The neighborhood uncle shows his inquisitive eyes and tantalizing moustache, still carrying the subtle nuances of army life, across the grills of the safely secured Iron Gate. I have to keep my fort well protected to keep stray humans from barging in. Scared of the virus I have turned too contemplative over the mantra of self-preservation, almost to the extent of a decadent, distrustful attitude. Even stray dogs are more welcome into the house these days. Well, he has been firmly shaped and caste into an irreplaceable disciplinarian mould in the army. Generally, this cast lasts well after the retirement, till the fag end of life in fact because the uniform, the badge, leather holster and gun buts are far too powerful instruments for the soul to forget even after the drill is over. Following the sacerdotal duty of self-defense, I am forced to greet him with the minimum courtesy. I stand the risk of sounding almost rude. Any traces of syncretism in spirit need to be quelled promptly. Meekly toeing the line of my fear, I have to ward him off till Corona lasts, but then I have to keep normal neighborly etiquette also for non-Corona times. It indeed is a big challenge. Given my overblown enthusiasm for social isolation, as a mark of my contribution in the war against Corona (as inspired by our caring and hardworking PM), I come dangerously close to sound outrightly impolite. I stop myself from falling too low just to save this physical self, which in any case all of us have to shed some day or the other. It’s totally unlike me. I can see shock and surprise surfacing in his eyes. ‘What has happened to this decent guy?’ he must have thought. But the dangerous equation of social isolation seems to spoil the very definition of mankind, i.e., mankind as a social animal. This Corona was buzzing the war beagle to spoil all community relations, leaving us antisocial animals.

I’m wrapped in hazardous emotions. ‘How are you Uncle?’ I try to pour sugar over my recently acquired bitterness, but end up asking like a robot with no warmth and affection.

All this while, I am scared that my usual smile would see my gate being crashed and the visitor barging in. I am standing at a distance from the gate, hoping that he just happens to pass along the street on his unmilitary type infringement of curfew. Well, strange were the times! Those who were instinctively prone to break law and regulation at every nook corner panicked the most and behaved like the most obedient kids. On the other hand, the normal time decent, law-abiding guys would become adventurists and get a taste of the changed attitude. May be they are like the otherwise cornered animals who now came out to jump, hop and gallop a bit on the empty stage.

Encouraged by my remedial action, his badminton racket, raised above his head and held with such firm conviction and pride as if it was a long-range rifle having telescopic sight, the ex-soldier greets me. I see it as a sword taken in an attacking stance to breach the defense system of the fort of my isolation.

‘Was getting bore son, so thought of having a bit of game,’ he says and I give the blankest of an expression in order to murder the evening badminton player in him. ‘And all these farmers, oofs the uncaring, ignorant Corona carriers give me jitters. Only you seem to give a sense of security about your following the rules,’ he tries to break the mask of my frigidity through the arrows of flattery. It appears he is really itching to play. His eyes attentive like binoculars probe deep into my feelings and thoughts.

He is a minimalist. If he offers tea to someone at his house, he would expect half of the things that go into making tea to be carried by the visitor himself. So I am sure he will be the last person to get his second racket to be spoiled in a game, even if he is proposing the game to beat his boredom. I am sure he is carrying only one racket. About shuttles I cannot think even in wildest dreams he will ever carry.

‘Ummn, sorry uncle my rackets are broken,’ I just keep things to the bare minimum to ward off any chance of a foreign foot treading my well-protected yard.

‘But yesterday I saw you playing badminton with your niece till late in the evening,’ he seems to complete a full game with one racket and without shuttles.

I had turned very mean during Corona times, as I have already mentioned. The lies slipped out like a hungry snake slithers out of its hole to chase a mouse. O God, so unlike me!

‘Yea, we had a fantastic evening full of badminton yesterday, but but…’ my usually honest tongue puts up a little coma as a mark of its protest before I splurge out the lie.

‘But, but what?’ he peers through the gate at the prisoner inside. Look at the scenario: here prisoners were fighting to keep their jails intact!

I expertly overcome the tiny coma of a protest and say with confidence, ‘By mistake the rackets were left in the barn store at night and at night mice had an amazing follow up game of badminton. The netting has holes where the biggest rats in the world can pass on easily.’

I was sure the mice had spoiled his game also. In fact, I was relieved a bit and held lesser grudge against the rodents now for creating a chance, through their fictitious part in the story, to ward off possible Corona carrying intruders.

‘Oh, even you are getting careless like these simpletons around,’ he swings his racket around to demarcate the circles of foolery, which in fact comes to cover the entire village. I am presented as an exception from the typical countryside lampoons. A matter of pride! But if I cherish the pride, I have to pay a price also! So I quell my ego and don’t accept the flattery. 

I derived sadistic pleasure out of this helplessness in his eyes. The moment of pleasure was, but, so short lived that I hadn’t yet felt its comforting feel in the tiniest part of my brain. He murdered my pleasure like he must have thought of murdering the enemies in the battlefield. Well, he never fired a bullet in his entire career by the way, so my father teased him as a bagpiper soldier, for which he has never forgiven my father even 10 years after my father left his body, leaving the aggrieved soldier to keep nursing the scars on his soldierly conscience.

I focus my eyes to conform what they see might be wrong. Uncle soldier has done a coup. I see two rackets in his hands held tightly in his fist like he is holding the triumphant flag of mother India proclaiming victory after a bloodied battle. In the other hand, he holds the shuttle proudly by the tip. He holds it like he has won an Olympics gold medal. The most exuberant soldier! I don’t think I can bear up with the assault for too long now. I stand in utter helplessness.

‘We will have a game,’ the intruder beams with sadistic pleasure.

‘Uncle you are so well informed I know. This Corona…’ I use my last bullet against the enemy.

‘This Corona can’t kill our spirits!’ he cuts my bullet right in the middle of its path by the thundering cannon shot of his war cry.

‘Here is the sanitizer!’ he shows off another item from his armory. ‘The rackets and the shuttle are well rubbed with the sanitizer. In fact you need to be cleaned up to be entitled to touch them!’

My fort lies broken and vandalized. The enemy is in. I cannot hold my fort anymore. As the victorious King, he decides the terms of negotiation. I am the defeated King and have to listen and follow up his instructions. Regardless of all the revolt within me, I find myself obediently rubbing sanitizer on my hand to change my status of an untouchable.

As I rub, he is peering into the pores of my soft poetic hands. He is charged with a heady over-pouring of his martial spirit. ‘Rub with force man! You are still young. Destroy each and every Corona rascal from your hands. It’s a war!’ he is no longer a miser with the sanitizer bottle and pours a big splurge, as if I am a confirmed Corona case. Looking at the way he is using it so copiously, I am sure he has moved out the entire sanitization stock from the army canteen, where they get it at amazingly subsidized rates.

Cowering under the scorching brilliance of his clean-up job, I am sufficiently quarantined. ‘I have to keep in check any involuntary coughing during the play, otherwise he will immediately call police and doctors to get me isolated at the stinking civil hospital in the city nearby!’ in my sullen silence I take stock of the imperiled situation.

Like the shuttle cock that reached the highest heaven, his gamesmanship is soaring and leaping to hit farthest point of the cosmos. ‘After every set, we will sanitize our hands as well as the shuttle and the rackets!’ I hear him setting up his kingdom after conquering the enemy territory. My spirit is already defeated. So I start with unwilling movements. All I hear is his warlike guffaws and instructions. ‘He never fired a bullet while in the army,’ I hear my father’s sagely baritone voice. ‘So the old soldier is trying to win wars here after retirement,’ I am having my revenge intangibly. I move sluggishly to beat down his enthusiasm for a competitive game and get him bored to hell. Even by losing you can defeat many people!

‘Aren’t you feeling well? Um, not feeling ok! Some problem…Corona!’ Before he gives the final confirmation of one more Corona case, I am forced to cut him short with a hard smash which nearly missed his nose.

With my mean-looking, exuberant arresting and hard hit, I give a laudable proof that I am feeling OK and there is no Corona scare in the yard. But a defeated soldier bears all ignominy. The victor thinks he is all sense and the fallen one is all nonsense. Having sanitized me, thus availing the advantage of incalculable value, rhetorically he is finding faults with my ways of covering the court, my movements, my way of holding the racket, in fact everything. Oofs! I know I am not even the village champion. But, am I that horrible at badminton?! I am trying my level best to keep my temper in stock instead of losing it.

But the heights of insanity now! ‘You have to dive while you try to reach for a shot from a distance. Don’t run unnecessarily like this and tire yourself out!’ his latest instruction lands like molten lead in my ears. His verve is villainous as he offers the fresh set of chinks in my badminton armor.

Well, guys this is intolerable. The whistling winds of broken lose temper come forcefully nagging at restrained self. When and where did you see a player diving to reaching the shuttle in a game of badminton? You dive in the air to take a catch in cricket. You do it because after that you roll on to the ground and you don’t have to immediately get back to your feet to hit the shuttle back. I cannot make the head and tale of it. This is painstakingly and absurdly endowed with chronic puzzlement.

With my hands on my hips in a confrontationist stance with trappings of open animosity, I ask him like an Indian General will ask his Pakistani counterpart, ‘Well uncle, what do you mean by diving to hit the shuttle. Am I a cat, so that I will jump up again within a fraction of a second to return the shot? Do you expect me to stop the dive midair and get back into the normal stance? One takes long strides and lunges forward to hit the shuttle. When did any player on earth dive to hit the shuttle, Uncle?’ I am irritated to the hell.

Soldier uncle still has his confidence in the face of my unsporty fusillade. ‘Yes, you have to dive!’ he says with steely determination. ‘Like this!’

He moves sideways to demonstrate like an old, old leopard cat. With his racket aloft he hops like an old toad sideways to jump like you do in sacked-foot race. This jump of a couple of feet sideways turned out to be his dive. Why would you put up so much of effort to walk like a Penguin, if without effort you can run like a rabbit, a bit old though?

‘But why would one jump like a frog in a hot pan, if one can take one’s foot in a lunge forward position or just parting the legs a bit more than the normal?’ I am clueless about this latest Bermuda Triangle tragedy.

He is doing it in a fabulous, prodigious spell of spirit like he is the coach of the Indian badminton team, hops to this way, then that way. These are the dives to beat the world champion. I am stunned by an assault of sudden laughter. I bend down with hilarity. I hold my guts to save them from the ravages of laughter. He is confused about what is so funny about it. That’s how it is done, he is sure. With laughter-assaulted waters in my eyes, I go to his part of the court and hug him for his cutest old toad hops, the so called dives, which he believes can beat the best in the world.

As I hug him, I hear him muttering with suspicion, ‘Hope you have been washing clothes daily, that too in Detol’

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We have paid too dearly for our mercurial, sensual entertainment as a species. Homo-sapiens beware, it might be the start of our extinction! Mother Nature has its own calculations to decide what is good or bad overall. While only our species, out of the millions habiting this little gob of earth floating in the cosmos, was sulking, the rest looked jubilant. The air turned fresher and salutary in mood. The skies gleamed clearer. With the unyielding, cynical snob cornered for the time being with inescapable guilt, Mother Nature tried to seep through the tantalizing gaps available for the time being. Chastised under savage indictment, we turned gloomy. The noise was less. I didn't know whether to celebrate or sulk. So grappling with funnily scholarly disputations, I stood in between, trying to keep intact my intellectual and moral stature. I felt sad for the Homo-sapiens. I felt happy for the rest of our earthlings. Also, standing on the middle line, bridging the volatile and obvious chasm, separating our species from the rest, I prayed for a good for all solution where everybody has a right to joy and nobody sulks.

Is it too much to ask for? It may be easier than we think, provided we cut the greed to the limits of need; reshape our value system and learn to take peace and joy as prized as gold; systematically nurture the emotional quotient in our next generation with the same urgency as we force their intelligence quotient; most importantly, replace a sense of blind competition with beneficent cooperation; and realign the parameters of victory to include excellence and intangibles of sweet persona in the trophy of winner. All the things that have messed up the scene currently are our mind creations only. If these are failing to set up a joyful world, we can systematically create a different reality using our minds. What is the big deal about it?

We always have the choice to change our course if we find ourselves running into the storm. We have the option to take silent but solid steps to a better destination. Stop taking power, designation, wealth, bank accounts and scores of other superficial glitterati as the only achievable pinnacle of human destiny, the only destination of our efforts, the sole meaning of life. Give equal weightage to love, compassion, empathy and rosy pink aesthetics in a person's character as recognizable, respectable traits and reward these accordingly to give them a life of decency. If our mind can fix values worth millions of dollars to stones found in nature, and which are of no value to any other species, why can't we devise ways and means to reward softer things of life? Let’s take a walk in the sultry night and go on the unmettled path replete with moral bounties and treasure-trove of humane sensibilities. Endless are the resources of Mother Nature. Let’s abandon the cacophonous mainstream preening for a while. Let’s come out of our well-gated and guarded prisons of insecurities and enjoy the long-winded crisp snippets of freedom. Let’s tear out the wooden posts and head-posts, stakes and fences that have imprisoned us inside the walled enclosure of our own desires, making it a We Vs Others world. Let’s put the cruelly capacious, usual paraphernalia in a corner for a while. It just means this much as to turn the cloth-bag inside-out. Let’s turn the magnifying glass to our own face and peek deep into the wrinkles, pouches, crow-feet, spots, blotches, acne and warts bearing astounding testament to our mistreatment of our own selves by misusing the whole that contains the part that we are.

All we need to do is to stop the mad race to plunder each and everything. Walk slowly and enjoy the laidback, fluttering and lacy waterfall spray charm of the life in slow motion. As much as we need a vaccine against Corona, we need Pause in life all the same to save us from the perils of the blinding race. The moment we let go of our savage squeeze over her throat, She the forgiving mother will surely forget her long litany of woes and smile at the errant kid. She just needs a bit of release from our embrace-trap, our hold with claws of illustrated idiosyncrasies, knotted in themselves to turn suicidal. Then see what a paradise mother earth gives us as a reward within two decades. Otherwise we will futilely keep fighting as an enemy of mother existence. Intoxicated with our hi-tech buffoonery and super-sensitive egotism, we shouldn’t forget that endless are her arrows from countless directions. As a mother endless is her compassion. But as an opponent, forced to be so due to our steady, unvacillating and persistently pronounced mischief, fathomless is the scope of her ire. With our bloated bravado, funny pitter-patter and puny gurgle, how long we will fight? Just listen to her a bit and take a stock of the perks and perils held with equipoise in her hands for us to choose. Let’s bow and show some respect to the illimitable inexplicability of her ways and means. The showers of bliss wait us if we approach her like a little child marveling at the sea, enjoys and rolls over the beach sand and takes as much of sand, mud, shells and water as befits our playfulness and need. Why try to be a master of the sea? Better that we don't come as a robber. With a robust contortion to her smile, she will shoot us down. It fits us to approach as a smiling child moving to his mother to hold her hand. There she stands waiting for us to correct our ways. Do it or keep fighting till our fears turn our physiognomy into almost a machine, with flesh and blood gone and replacements inserted to the collapsed organs that were nothing but an extension of the nature around us. The parts of lung gone with the forests. The heart gone with the support system and so did other organs. With all the metallic insertions in our flesh and blood, a new robotic species will evolve. Nothing wrong with this evolution, just that we will be missing the molten layers of emotions and the luminous tranquility of our sense and sensibilities that define us as a species currently. We will be extinct like so many species we have ourselves pushed to extinction. With nothing else to push into extinction, we will prod our own selves into extinction. All that will be left will be a sadly stern, metallic machine, a sort of walking and moving matter. All our jargon mongering hardly matters to mother Earth. With yet another profound twist and secretive imagination, she will readjust herself to the new mischief monger like it has done so far.

But why allow things to go that far. It still is reversible. She is indefatigable beauty! Let’s halt a bit of our deadly toxicity and show a bit of care from our side and she will bloom again like a flower surviving the stormy night.

The storm screeched through the night,

Poured its fury through sadistic love bite,

Undefeated but smiles the beauty,

Still doing its fragrant duty,

Her holy petals bear

the storm's violating drops without fear,

Holy beads now they are,

Smiles, smiles and no war!

֍♠֎

I have a date with 'Her' in the wee hours of the morning! With the evil Corona giving fresh grief to humanity every passing moment, I follow the sulphurous shades of the tempestuous priestess. She draws me into poetic swathes like a Greek goddess holding the chalice of Aphrodite of desire and sensuality. And the potently obnoxious reality turns magically dreamy. You create an alternate reality. Held in this inexplicable conjoination, the rag-tag competing interests lose their pinching edges. The whispering shades of the evolving ubiquity embrace with a lushly lustrous pout.

My eyes open at 3 in the morning today. There is something special, my gut feeling appears to intimate. I go outside. A mammoth wave of pleasant surprise shakes up the last traces of sleep from my body. Is it 28th of March or some frigid January night? Time seems to have drawn back by at least a couple of months. There is dense fog and chill in the air. It makes you feel as if spring is still out there in the other hemisphere.

At the start of this night on other the other side of the zero hour, a terrible rainstorm lashed once again, like it has been doing all through the winters. It’s very, very unlikely to have such wet conditions during winters and spring in this part of the world. The wheat, mustard, peas and tomatoes have been decimated. Mother Nature appears to be on an all out war against the humans. This particular rainstorm is supposed to further dent the wheat crops, leaving only just sufficient to feed the farmers, forget about selling anything for commercial gain.

Well, to the poet in me the sight of such a wet, cold foggy night, when there is supposed to be warm gusts of air from the western side, appears as a gift from Mother Nature. I take long draughts of fresh cold air and allow my eyes to literally melt in the night stage set up around the fog. Tiny hazy stages set up by the smatterings of electric bulbs here and there leave me dazzled. I come back to the house and lie on my cot and chant Mahamritnjya Mantra for individual and collective salvation against the Corona virus. Even in the desolate cold and foggy wetness, the world of humans seems terribly dented. I keep chanting for almost an hour and involuntarily find myself getting ready for a long walk in the silvery darkness. It’s very exciting as I lace up my shoes.

I decide against carrying umbrella, feeling it would be like trying to play too safe. This is the night to open up; to be alone in the fog-augmented and well-bathed darkness. Cold air hits my face as my shoes create squelching sound in the empty village streets. Even the dogs have taken a clue from the dispirited world of their masters. I don’t hear any growls as I move on. The darkness is dazzled with silvery crown of fog. I see the tell tale signs of the night rainstorm. Trees stand mute, bow headed in reverence to Mother Nature. They still play naughty as big drops of water still soaked in their canopy sprinkle over me and I look upward to see if it has started to rain again.

With open-armed teasing, winking and seductive invitation, the countryside opens her uninhibited charms in the vaporous darkness as I emerge out of the village. It’s a silent world more than ever I remember in the recent years. All the noise has got sucked indoors, leaving the countryside maiden to come out in its naked beauty, her wild tresses open and tossed by the rainstorm. Her lithe body washed by the holy waters. Her curves hidden in the silvery veil of the cloth that hangs loosely around her majestic body. She has a seductive smile on her lips and eggs me on. ‘Come, come o thou solitary journeyman, enjoy my unrestricted charms!’ I almost gallop to grab all of her to my own individual self. We have been branded and customized to be greedy. Even aesthetically we turn greedy. I walk on to lay my hands upon as much as I can receive from her willingly inviting persona.

The little countryside path serpenting across the farmed fields, linking the neighboring hamlets, has its chessboard set up in the dark. I have my mobile with me but decide against using its torch. I don’t want her to be discomforted by the glare of the molester of the darkness. I want her to be totally at ease and completely happy. Only then she will open her secrets to me. I am her lover. I have to get involved as per her terms and conditions. The weather-stomped little sinewy path has its own set of puzzle games to play with me. The places where I presume it to be smooth walkable earth turn out to be puddles of water; the assumed water puddles come out to be smooth solid earth. We deceive only ourselves with our assumptions and presumptions and then blame the path. I start doing the opposite of my assumptions and quite surprisingly I am able to walk decently. My shoes are wet. My track pants below the shins are completely wet, but this is between me and my lovely night, so no blame game and grudges.

At places the path is under water, so I have to get onto the narrowest of embankment to move ahead. It’s like walking on a tightrope. Muddy water on the one side and rain decimated wheat crop a few feet down the other side. The rope is actually Marijuana rope! The embankment is thickly overgrown with wild Marijuana plants. This season there is an abundance of Marijuana plants in and around the village. With things going wrong for the Homo-sapiens, Mother Nature probably wants to provide a rotund stock of artificial stimulation to get Samadhi and forgetfulness. We need to eat less and forget more. That is why She has destroyed the crops and blossomed Marijuana. A confession here. As I walk on the Marijuana tightrope in the silver-laced darkness, I feel like committing a little scandal by chewing a few Marijuana leaves. But then I decide against it. I don’t want to be an intoxicated lover. I have to be fully alert to enjoy her charms. Moreover, those who have tasted the meditative forgetfulness will find any substance funny like kid’s game. So I allay the funny thought and move on to meet the lovely maiden hidden still deeper into the broader horizons. As I jump onto the path again, my shoes squelch with water and my pants are all wet. I feel cold now, so stop for a moment to take stock of my situation.

I remember a rain-soaked peacock, with Kilos of water in its long plume. The gallant then shakes it off with a vigorous shaking and continues to dance. So like a half-drenched peacock having accomplished a Marijuana rope walk, I jump, hop and shake the moisture. It warms up my body.

Utter peace and silence pervades each and every particle of the fog floating around. A lapwing titters in its usual accusative voice against the intruder. It lays its eggs on the ground and keeps a watch like an unsparing watchman. The moment it sees anyone near around, it raises a screeching ruckus. Her protests shake the sleepy silver-veiled darkness out of its slumberous state.

Plants, trees, bushes and thickets by the path stand frozen in time. On both sides, wheat crop lies decimated. Still Mother Nature will give enough for the stomach, if not more for the purse in addition. And countless are her ways to distribute what it takes from the humans to other species. So trillions and trillions and still more insects, rodents and birds will feast upon the fallen crop. Plunder in one corner comes as a perk in some other corner. It’s never a total loss.

In the distances I hear dogs barking in the thatched mushroom dorms. Business and economies have fallen flat and become redundant as of now. The Corona threat. It feels so safe here in this silver-laced silence. Faint silhouettes of threes on the silvery dark canvas make it feel as if time itself has stopped and suspended from its round the clock service. With each step away from the scared den of the humans, I feel sinking into the surrendered charms of the welcoming hostess. I touch my overgrown hair. Fog has settled down in dew drops on my head. I walk like a proud owner prince of this silence and peace. But then I have some dew mascara on my eyelashes also. What a makeup she has given me. I almost giggle.

In the rain-beaten foggy stillness and silence crickets sing their morning hymns. Their cricketing notes sound like very ample marching notes for the gallant me. I am on the way to shake hands with peace and silence without the risk of catching Corona. There is hardly any chance to come across any human being and I can spread my wings like a majestic eagle in the open skies. I reach a small bridge over an irrigation canal. The waters are holy. The canal carries Yamuna waters. It flows like an unassuming mystical flute. The ripples sound like honey drops fall from the cosmic comb into the waters. It’s so sweet. I can taste the sweetness of this sound. I am supposed to hear the sweetness, but it sweetens my tongue also.

As I walk, I feel the tingling sensation of the bioelectrical energy through my body as if I have been aroused by her soft touch. Beyond the world of bodily ejaculations, it is about the arousal of the entire self to take one to the stage of holistic orgasm, of mixing Yin and Yang within. Call it Chi energy or Prana, it’s the same thing and all of us have it. Just that we try to look out and exist on the surface and become insensitive to feel it. Go within and you will feel its orgasmic sensation! I am not into the business of spirituality. They have made it sound like an exotic art and craft to set up institutions and incubate immense followership. They make it sound like the toughest job where only the choicest few can succeed. Frankly speaking, if we overcome this urge to be a guru who possesses mystical powers, and guide all and sundry about the most evident secret without beating around the bush, each and everyone of us can feel this cosmic gingham. The neurons of my brain dance to the particles of cosmos. It itself creates an orgasmic buzzing and humming, which tries to set up a duet with the crickets around.

I come across at a farm side square. Another path cuts my path perpendicularly. I know the geometrical importance of this symmetry; of humans setting up an energy flow with their guided walk for the routine farming chores. There is an extra coagulation of energy there. It shoves at the apron of my bioelectric energy rushing to meet the hitherto untouched maiden of silence and peace. I respond to its pull. Stand there on the square and my Chi, or Prana responds to the lump of energy around. My hands and body move in symmetry, a kind of Tai Chi movements—I have never learnt, read or watched videos of these movements by the way—to align my meridians with the energy piece put on a platter for the guest by the teasing beauty. I feast upon it. It’s immensely energizing and reinvigorating.

With gentle fluidity, the day is holding the hand of the silvery darkness. The fog is lit up with grey traces of light. Indian rockchat, the expert early morning chatterer, starts chitchatting from the trees around. The deeply resonant coo…ooop cooo…oopp of the coucal reminds her that she has to go to the swathes of slumberous folds now. And there she takes hurried steps, with a mischievous smile on her lips, and love in her eyes, and moves further ahead before I can touch her fingers. I can see the hand still open and fingers moving in a smiling, coquettish bye. ‘Some other day!’ she says. The fog is dazzling now with the first signs of the twilight. Across the clouded panorama, I see her escaping to her royal bedchamber to sleep. She is looking back with a smile now and then. I take a turn and start back to the world of Corona scared humans.

֍♠֎

The last day of March and the spring still lingers on like a shy bride. It pleasantly empathizes through the dewy smiles of flowers. The wrinkles born of the tensioned maelstrom of desire seem pacified. Lungful of resuscitating breeze sways the dew-kissed flowers. There is life and living with a blessed pause.

All pains and suffering lose their meaning in the face of such smiles. Waking up to a beautiful spring morning is as good as crossing over from darkly life-negation to sunny life-affirmation. The worst of frosty nights are over. The pervading sadness, defeat, deprivation and icy destruction melts to give way to luminous, fascinating anecdotes. Spouting lifeful steam, the sun shines warmly over new buds, soot and saplings that chime with rapturous reception. The touch of air is savoring-fresh, gratifying and irresistible. The skies bathed in repainted vulnerable blue. The trees assertive and ready with fresh chapter heads in the form of new saplings. The birds ecstatic and sound delightfully witty. And with a hesitant, tentative and kissable smile, Mother Nature sends her assurance through a belated spring. We are ready for the re-readings of the timeless message: The message of love, life, living and compassion. It’s high time we listen to it. Our uniquely all-consuming and enslaving civilization has provided a huge blackboard for the message to be glaring white. It looks like the entire earth has been written all over.

Her child is sick. Battling all fatigue and grief, in tune with her innate rhythm, She has redecorated the garden with utmost care and an unconditional acceptance of Her motherly duties. So that when the child comes out of the sick bed, there will be a refined version of the playground for plenty of fun and frolics. A mother cannot be cruel; she can just be remedial at her worst. She just put her hyperactive child to bed for rest and recuperation. Most importantly, she has given the little picture of alphabets for the child to revise and recollect the basics of existence, the simplest things which the child has forgotten as it made its post-docs thesis too long, tortuous and complex. It’s the time to endorse empathy and shed the burden of always walking the tightrope. It’s the high time to overcome the disenchantment and weariness of our own progress and learn to smile more and give priority to the things that give us more smiles and less frowns. It’s now the moment to explore and acquire the natural cosmetics of health and glow with peace of mind. It’s now to embrace tender piety, hug the trees, kiss the flowers, listen to the singing rivulets, lie on the grass and stare at the vast canvas of the sky and breathe in life and let go of anger, hate and jealousy. This is the moment to shed toxic and contemptible egotism and parasitic stupidity of animosity to the rest of the species and love animals. Let’s allow Mother Nature to stay undisturbed in pristine forests. Let’s maintain the sanctity of the seas. Let’s distribute dignity to the masses instead of amassing wealth in select pockets. Let’s make this little home earth a paradise instead of seeking heaven in the cosmos. It’s the time liberate faith from the clutches of dogma; to replace paranoid competition by balmy cooperation; to rest and repose for creative imagination; to walk joyfully instead of huffing and puffing to another same boring destination; to be joyful and help others be the same; to complete the journey so joyfully and fully that the culmination loses its pain; to reach the destination full of grace, dignity and with a smile; to say goodbye not with a painful sigh, but with smiling tears of feeling blessed!

֍♠֎

There is something very disconcerting. I name it as the Wuhan Syndrome. It tries to stab the salubrious strains of democracy with its dictatorial fangs. With its smothering kisses it tries to drag out the last ounces of sap of virtuosity in the body of free choice.  It’s creepy and gaining ground to lay the world as we know it under siege. Ironically, despite its recurrent betrayal as any class-based system does, it still draws steam from the vices of capitalist profiteering. With its superfluous ideology it creeps ahead scornfully with undisguised contempt for anyone and anything perceived as class enemy. Seamless is its desire for power and still more power. In its wake it sows seeds of the next-gen warfare.

Is anybody talking about building next generation warplanes, satellite shooters, next monster ballistic missiles, some super-dad of a Nitro, hydro or any x, y, z bomb or any other type of extension to our greed for power? Are there top security meetings taking place to rule the planet? Everything has been pushed to the corner in the face of a common threat. Lesson number one, in the face of irreversible damage to Mother Nature and the over-sweeping forces of globalization, the problems will be common for Homo-sapiens. So stop creating any more among yourself. These are nothing but assumptions, insecurity and virtual fears in the face of imagined boundaries and mind-contrived notions of having different interests and identity. The walls have crumbled now. It’s just one open field. So play the same game for the benefit and enjoyment of everyone.   

Irrespective of the fact whether the patient zero was an inadvertent culinary experiment in Wuhan animal market or some chance, mischance, deliberate, half-deliberate or any other reason possible pushing the situation to the leaking of the deadly virus manufactured in the Wuhan biological weapon test lab, the result is that it has carried out the repercussions of the scale of world war three. Wars have changed shapes and context over the millennia. The greed for power, the rapacious urge to dominate, the ever-persistent gluttony for more and more, all these and more that gratify individual and collective ego are itself deadly mutants that have hijacked our creative brains to keep the destructive trait one step ahead of the peaceful use of our logic and reasoning. The main thing is: we have failed to learn to live in peace.

China and its ambitions to be the all powerful master isn’t the only genesis of the problem. It’s a symbol of our collective greed for more and more by killing the aesthetics in mankind in parallel with burning the house, the little planet, we live in. Behind its iron curtail, things have been very shady in China. The strongest in the Chinese society destroyed millions of their own softer lives in the name of an ideology that nurtures the biggest evil in the name of serving the cause of the maximum, i.e., communism. A serpent which is used to eating the weaker ones among its own species will hardly stop at dining in its own house. It will slither out of its hole to gobble up preys outside also. Like they can boil live animals to satisfy the cravings of their tongue, they will hardly listen to any prick of conscience before planning to unleash any suffering on the humanity outside the Chinese borders. This steely resolve is their strength and is uniquely singular in its inclination to dominate other political systems at any cost.

Raw aggression serves its purpose in the brute game of the survival of the fittest. But that is where the entire meaning of humanity and our evolution gets lost. It’s like retracing the steps back to the pre-historic times when our ancestors survived as one of the animals in caves and forests. We could break that vicious loop of the naked game of the survival of the fittest only because we had the power to group and manage things collectively. Contrary to the belief that our reasoning served as a weapon to enable us to reach the pinnacle of food chain and rule the planet, it’s the still more effective soft power of emotions and empathy that served as the basic fuel of our civilizational progress. The use of logic, reasoning and the subsequent science and technology is merely the means to achieve the ends of cooperation, harmonious coexistence and the common goal to excel as a species. With only raw aggression, we would still have been struggling as one of the apes in the forests. We excelled not because we made deadly weapons with uncanny, faultless precision. We thrived because we could consciously love and were aware of our empathy to contrive things and manage affairs with a larger collective identity. Now with no other species in the arena to compete against, we are carrying the struggle to excel within the species. So the domain of collective affiliation and identity is shrinking now after expanding to its peak when Homo-sapiens primarily identified with their own species to evolve at all levels. Now the collective affiliations are shrinking within the Homo-sapiens. It now shrinks along the boundaries of nationality, religion, caste, creed, class, continent and many more. Just as we fought against other species, now we create different subspecies of mankind on the basis of caste, class, nationality, ethnicity and religion. It’s the same age old war that we started against other species. We have been habituated to compete at all costs, even though there is hardly any need anymore, leaving it a divided house now at the risk of crumbling down far earlier than anyone of us can think of.

As I look at China’s shimmering obsession for more power and clout, I have to point out that I am no supporter of the USA either. The innings in the power game are rarely played with the straight bat. It’s always about setting up effective counterweights against any challenger. They have been doing all that takes in the power game to stay the de facto ruler of the planet. It includes sustaining conflicts world over to weaken nations and encash resources out of the conflict areas. However, the saving grace is that they are a functioning democracy. It’s still an orthodox household. Even at their witty best and cynical worst they have limits to their games of subjugation. They cannot go into unheard of territories. The rulers risk demotion by popular choice. The people of course have a direct role in choosing their head. The option of choosing a leader still leaves a whole lot of prospects for the humanity. At least, the head of the state is accountable. He cannot go all reckless and unguarded in pursuit of power. He has the obligation of hiding his fangs and appear cheerful and generous. He has the necessity of going out with outstretched hands to the electorate and get the license of governance renewed again. The leadership in China, on the other hand, is not accountable to anybody. They hold their power unswervingly and are unscathed from any adverse opinion. No wonder, such unaccountable power sitting on the head of such immense resources is nothing sort of a potential hazard for the masses both within and outside their boundary.

Now, with just 3000 Covid deaths, which is nothing in comparison to the millions slaughtered under communism, they are in a fine position to start throwing the sickened humanity outside the Chinese borders with characteristically cheap, hardly reliable medical supplies. The world is on its knees as the virus with layered oeuvre and incredible complexity teases and tests our immunity forts. The Chinese meanwhile are gleefully waiting to have a sumptuous bite of the pie of our collective miseries. They have inexhaustible hunger for more business and earn more money. All this is a default setting for bigger clout internationally. Their state policy embedded in prejudice, and amply goaded and lauded by the seminal themes of the Red Book, is wagging its tail with full force. Their biggest rival is on the knees with the risk of even 100,000 people dying from Corona virus. That is what is most important to the Chinese. They hardly care if there have been collateral damages to their own late-found cronies like Italy, who had become the junior sergeant of the Chinese belt and road initiative meant to tie a serpent knot on the world economy. Italy unfortunately served as the launch pad for infecting the entire Europe and the rest of the world in its wake, given Europe’s position in the day to day functioning of the world.

The wars in future will come in different colors than we have been used to see in the past. All of us have the fire-spitting metallic birds, the very same ballistic whales that swim in the seas outside our atmosphere and then dive to strike suddenly, the very same fire and hell spewing nuclear bombs, the same guns, mortars and military arsenal. All countries can kill similarly. So who will take the risk of hitting with the same weapon that lies in the opponent’s holster also? The new weapon is inelegant shrewdness and ingenuity to hit the opponent’s interests in almost invisible, indirect and intangible ways. Corona isn’t a self-evident war. Beyond the estimations of what and whys of it, it is primarily an epidemic. The scourge is visible to the human eyes. Only its tell tale effects are visible. Instead of investing in firearm factories, you invest in setting up stages, where the real motives always stay behind the scene of the confusion. You incubate pandemics. You smartly calculate the reactions, visualize the scenes arriving on the stage later after the silent trigger has been launched in the murky haze of human brains, then you act, behave and respond in the ways where the unsuspecting sufferers hardly believe you to be the real mutant brain behind the chaos. And you draw out advantages, indirectly, out of the things changing to a chaos on the stage. Things indeed appear incidental. While in reality it turns out to be a well-scripted act.

Not that the rest of the super-power aspirants won’t do the same. They will definitely try the same. It’s only about who can be more deadly. It is not about choosing the best. There is hardly any option for that. It is simply about ‘who is a lesser evil’. And democracy is always going to be a lesser evil. With the next generation warfare, a closed and secretive form of government is most qualified to succeed, where there is no specific battleground for the players, no specifically outlined cause other than ultra-jingoistic nationalism and no tangible target to grab. All you know is that you have to weaken the opponent at any cost and draw advantages out of that. You can do anything you want, simply because you are not answerable to anyone among the domestic population.

The motive has been the same historically. But the ingenuity of human brain was only limited to swords, and later modern weapons, where there were cuts and bruises on both sides. So if China sacrifices its own 3000 people, it will take it as its share of casualties in the new version of warfare. If with the stage-managed loss of such lives, they can bring down the entire planet on its knees, wreak havoc with the global economy and suspend all other forms of military competence in the rival camps, they will take it gleefully. In the conventional warfare, you cannot even win a local battle in lieu of such number of casualties.

Deadliness is now sneaking into the domain of intangibles. Like this virus is invisible. You don’t get alert like you can do on seeing a snake. To forge out such an invisible enemy, you have to be very ingenuous in approach also. In fact, that is primarily the investment to launch the campaign. It’s about breaking all boundaries of ethics, because even in a bloody conventional war including the nuclear weapons, which are pretty conventional as of now by the way, even with your numerical and technical superiority, you give your enemy a chance to fight and die to uphold their own belief, values and position. Like in villages, the feuding farming families may unleash their fury on each other. They may murder, they may do whatever we have known as routine in terms of violence. But still there are boundaries, almost unbreakable, which even the worst enemies avoid. Their animosity seems to melt away beyond the broadly recognizable contours. All farmers have their crops under the open vault of skies. A major portion of their economic interests lies open to any kind of risk imaginable. That is the domain where mine and yours merge. You want your enemy to be decimated, but you want all farms free of fires because there is something, a voice of conscience that stops you. Your own sense of ego cuts you down in your own eyes if you think anything like that. It belittles you. Those are the open skies, the rivers and the lakes. You avoid that and decide to fight a bit on the tangible stage, where there are chances of you suffering also. But you take that as an offering to the Goddess of your ego. A Chinese type of next-gen warfare has the capability to breach any such false sense of curtailment by one’s ego. They are capable of doing anything in the name of innovation. Heart has no say. The calculating part of the brain has swiping powers, simply because their secretive system of governance allows the maximum chance to groom such a nefarious capability. Here the farmer will simply go out and cut his crop, leaving a portion of his own to be seen as burning with the rest, and light the fire. That’s it. You can defend your military installations, your cities, your borders, but limitless breaches are there in the porous and open realm of air, water and forests, the things lying there in the open like farming fields lie there only at the mercy of a sense of conscience, a self-accepted boundary, making them safer than the missiles hidden in deep bunkers.

This Chinese syndrome isn’t an outcrop in abstract. It is the recipe born of the collective fire of modern humanity’s misguided sense of achievement, in grotesque dehumanized values which put human interests before anything else on this little planet co-shared by millions of other species. Just cause and effect man! Like in a weakened immune system, the disease has to start somewhere; here also it happens to get into effect from a system of governance most suitable for the evil-effects of our unsustainable practices to be carried out. So taming China is just a partial solution. In the absence of systematic overhaul of the overall value system, we will have a new version of the Chinese kind new-gen warfare and stealth somewhere else. It’s just a symptom. And treating symptoms never fully cures the root cause of a disease. 

As we go into a global lockdown, it’s the time to think and ponder. The things discussed above are mere symptoms of a bigger malady: our collective greed at the level of our species. What is the use of wreaking havoc without limits to greed and create trillions strong economies, if you have to spend trillions again to ward off the consequences, as the roof of the cave over our head, where we have been mining, caves in? Can’t we be happier with less, and that less will be still more than what we will be left with after spending on emergency solutions to save ourselves from plethora of cascading problems.

Rest man rest! Pause. Hell won’t break lose if you take a pause for some time. You will still have the same little gob of earth circling around the sun; you will have the same days and night, same weather systems. In fact, you will have a better version of everything else, as the sand raised by your hooves settles down while you take a rest for some time. Our smoke-spewing vehicles and industries have fallen silent. Ask anyone, the skies are clearer than ever in the recent decades. Delhi has AQI like any Nordic capital. Can you believe it?! Ozone layer is replenished. Birds appear to chirp more enthusiastically. See, what can your hiatus bring to this little home of ours in just a week! Use the Wuhan syndrome and the resultant Tsunami for forging a better future. Catastrophe has no limitations. It takes millions of years to make, and a few chaotic moments to break. It will take China a bit of time to realize its mistakes. And realize they will some fine day, I am sure. Meanwhile, if the rest of the world mends its ways, the Chinese next-gen warfare and the value system of their ill-conceived competence will become irreverent. Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent noncooperation will accomplish what super-nukes cannot do. Make it all versus one, but in a nonviolent compassionate way. Just don’t cooperate with the Chinese version of hegemony and dominance at any cost.

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Certain fundamental sanctities have been subverted. So it’s high time to Pause or Perish. It’s the time to slow down and take cognizance of angst-filled, cluttered to the guts Mother Earth.

Mother Nature has its own calculations to decide what is good or bad overall. While only one species, out of the millions habiting this little gob of earth floating in the cosmos, is caught in predicament and is sulking, the rest are jubilant.  The air is fresher with sing-song ambience. The skies are clearer with expressive phrases of a bigger truth than we comprehend. The noise is less, giving a clue to some remarkably perceptive silence. I take a tremulous breath and off-beat emotions well up. I don't know whether to celebrate or sulk. So I stand in between. I feel sad for Homo-sapiens. I feel happy for rest of our earthlings. Also, standing on the middle line separating the king species from the rest, I pray for a good for all solution where all are happy and nobody sulks. Is it too much asking for? It may be easier than we think, provided we cut the greed to the limits of need; reshape our value system and learn to take peace and joy as prized as gold; systematically nurture the emotional quotient in our next generation with the same urgency as we force their intelligence quotient; and most importantly replace a sense of blind competition with beneficent cooperation; and realign the parameters of victory to include excellence and intangibles of sweet persona in the trophy of winner.

All the things that have messed up the scene currently are our mind creations only. If these are failing to set up a joyful world, we still have the option to systematically create a different reality using our minds. What is the big deal about it? Stop taking power, designation, wealth, bank accounts as the only achievable pinnacle of human destiny. Give equal respect to love, compassion and empathy in a person's character as recognizable traits and reward these accordingly to give them a life of decency. If our mind can fix values worth millions of dollars to the stones found in nature, and which are of no value to any other species, why can't we devise ways and means to reward softer things of life? Our sitting rooms are cluttered with too much reason. The aesthetics, the real juice of life, have been pushed to the periphery. Let’s crane our necks out of the coop and recapture our lost spirit to enjoy the multi-hued panorama.

Endless are the resources of Mother Nature. All we need to do is to stop the mad race to plunder each and everything. Walk slowly. Pause. Then see what a paradise mother earth gives you as a reward within two decades. Otherwise keep fighting as an enemy of mother existence. Endless are her arrows from countless directions. How long you will fight? Just listen to her a bit. Showers of bliss wait you. But don't come as a robber. She will shoot you down. It’s advisable to approach as a smiling child moving to his mother to hold her hand. There she stands waiting for you to correct your ways. Do it or keep fighting till your fears turn your physiognomy into almost a machine, with flesh and blood gone. Then a new robotic species will evolve; a sort of walking and moving matter. It hardly matters to mother Earth. She will readjust to a new mischief monger like it has done so far.

It’s the right time to pick up and sow spring seeds for the best version of the self as Mother Nature plays Twenty20 cricket game in the year 2020. She found it an apt chronological phase to start hitting sixes rampantly. (Of course, it seduced China to fix the game.) We may cry foul, but that doesn’t matter. ‘Foul’ has no relevance in the art of modern gameship because we have already flouted all norms and fouled innumerable times. So the guardian angels stand neutral as her ball chases us around the field. All this while, She had been playing test cricket with her silent majesty, calm demeanor, unperturbed mindfulness and inherent grace. Mankind then kept on getting onto a more and more adrenaline pumping game. They got into 50-50, one-dayer excitement. She still found it digestible somehow. However, the fast and furious kid started challenging her for Twenty20. There she loses her composure as the year strikes 2020 on the calendar. She decides to play Twenty20, racy, fast and furious, with sixes landing in the audience like deadly projectiles. Gone are those elegant ground-strokes to display class and take just one run or no run at all. Even classic defense earned laurels. So the ball turned into grenade and started giving bluish bumps on our heads. The crowd is in a melee now.

Well, the ball is nanometer sized. We cry foul that we cannot see it as it lands on our bodies with sadistic glee. But it is Her game, just like we contrived so many to entertain ourselves. We cannot complain now. We have been playing ours to the fullest of a visual extravaganza. Now it is her turn. The ball is a nanometer monster cutie. It has spikes over it to lock into the play arena of our cells and then keep on rolling to the boundary for sixes and fours. If the immunity fielders can stop it, the player saves the day. If not, the player is clean bowled.

In the ensuing stampede, the game having gone haywire, ‘Namaste’ is trending. Professional handshakes, cordial hugs and affectionate peck on cheeks all have been eaten and beaten by Corona for the time being. Humble ‘Namaste’ still stays out of Corona’s reach simply because it’s so unassuming, humble and simple to catch the evil bug’s devil eye. It’s so respectful. The virus is yet to breach its age-old rustic defenses. It has got the antibodies of unassuming grace and dignity, which has a hidden power even above the powers of any fee-fawing arrogant gesture.

‘Namaste’ means ‘Namah te’ in Sanskrit, i.e., I bow before you in full respect, taking you as a representative of God, a carrier of His godliness. Here lies the hope for the future. A humbler, less egoistic Homo-sapiens is beneficial not just to the planet but to their own species also.

Now, let’s salvage our positives from the Corona chaos. Let us allow this symbolism carried by ‘Namaste’ to turn into substance in our persona. Let’s be more fluid, mellowed and receptive. Fluidity has the soft power of sneaking out of supposed deadlocks by unegoistically circuiting out of many a problem. The boulders of ego merely clog the biggest of mountain passes. Let us be supine. Let’s melt our frigid egos to be more caring, understanding and loving. Let’s bow respectfully and gracefully to the fundamental principles of life, the bedrock of our existence. Let’s worship life and living with bowed heads. The blades of grass bend down and weather the fiercest of storms. The hardest oaks break and fall down, simply because they don’t bend down. Let’s learn from nature. America, China and all other global power aspirants anyone listening?

The virus gives a pernicious chuckle and our system gets choked. Automobile makers are rushing to make ventilators. DRDO, instead of pioneering killer missiles, is making medical masks. Millions of migrant workers, who throng cities like an ant-swarm sticks to a jiggery lump, are fleeing away like rats jumping out of a sinking ship. They are ready to risk life and be with their poor families in wretchedly backward countryside, where even death seems more tolerable than the suffocating life in the Corona-infested cities. Celebrities whose one coquettish look can break as well as elate million of hearts are cooking, washing and cleaning—most probably for the first time in their lives—as the domestic helps vanish from the scene. Hasn’t the world come upside down? Sirsasna is good for health even though it comes with lots of practice and a bit of discomfort initially. But it overhauls life and living if you master it. So as we do penance and learn to do a collective Sirsasna, let’s learn it properly and read the message straight. What we have been doing is hardly sustainable. We were going rapidly down the precipice to fall off the cliff. Thank Mother Nature, and China’s maneuvering as an agent of the evil that we deserve, there has been a pause, forced though. Errant kids hardly listen to the corrective message straightaway, by the way. Now let’s go back to the kindergarten of the basics of life and forget about the research and post-doc universities for some time. Life has been turned too complex, a quagmire almost. Better to take a by-lane and rest for some time.

Even in the face of grave danger, not all seems lost. Historically, the police have been ill reputed to bruise bums with their sticks. They do it still, but their sticks never appeared more justified in falling over asses as people break the lockdown instructions. However, in penance for one strike on an offending bum, they are doing 1000 pious deeds, while being out there in high risk places. They have surprised me in being so holistically caring. You see a policeman delivering medicine to a differently abled old man; a policeman feeding rasgullah to a patient whose sugar has come down dangerously low; you watch in disbelief as policemen sing songs to entertain people looking bored from their balconies; you giggle with a tinkling in stomach as you see policewomen doing the arti with diyas to embarrass the thick-skinned rascals, the milder versions of full blown criminals penalized by law, who are shameless enough to break the curfew; and the police personnel cooking food in their own kitchens out of their own pockets and feeding the hungry. The list is endless. I am humbled in the face of this totally new face of policing in India. As we will come out of this dark shade, the entire country will acknowledge this humane face of the police. Moral of the story: the police personnel are the best version of themselves as kind, considerate and helpful officers. So why don’t we have a society where the police people are not just half villains forced to tame the full criminals. Let’s have a society where policing is constructive as a care giver, helper and the life sustainer, not just scary system warding off the evil. Criminals listening? Mend your ways and allow police to be their best version!

Look at the changed equation! Doctors, nurses and paramedics are the new soldiers fighting lonesome, life-hazardous battles against the invisible enemy in isolation wards. The conventional soldiers with their guns and their patriotic blood boiling to kill and get killed look the worst version of a soldier. These doctors and their staff are the best version of soldiers who put their life in danger to save lives. Let’s have the best version well respected and valued in terms of rewards and applauds. Once the gloom is over, let’s have the soldiers who save, not just kill to ward off most of our virtual and assumed fears.

The highest of the high have been infested and so have been the lowest of the low. People from the royal families have died and so have the poorest of the poor. Lesson: it’s just one little humanity that is bound to suffer in the same ways if things go the wrong away. Let’s re-contrive our economic modules to allow the horizontal spread of benefits and the fruits of economic progress. Let’s transform economic growth into social development. The richest countries are suffering and the poorest are cowering with fear at the impending ill fate. Let the high and mighty draw some lessons out of this catastrophe and rethink about their priorities. Let there be some institutionalized grooming of art and aesthetics, not just cold hard logic and reasoning. Emotions and sensitivities are the shock-absorbers against the impending falls born of frigid logic and unforgiving reasoning. Pure reasoning cannot sustain. It can sustain machines but not humans as societies. To be logical, we have to stay sensitive also because we are flesh and blood creatures primarily.

In the politically stage-managed communal by-lanes of UP, the lotus of hope and love blooms in unthinkable circumstances. In Bulandshahr, an aged Hindu dies and his family can’t reach for cremation due to the lockdown. The diseased man’s Muslim neighbors perform the Hindu rituals to finish his journey. A group of Hindus manage to avail an ambulance and get a pregnant Muslim woman to hospital to save her life. A Hindu senior cop goes out of his ways to help a pregnant Muslim woman in reaching hospital in time for delivery. She delivers a baby boy. She hasn’t forgotten the act of kindness. She names her son after the cop: Ranvijaya Khan, a human being, half Hindu and Half Muslim in name, a blessed child who will be a living testimony to the triviality of man-created communal identities in the face of challenges that have no discrimination for caste, creed, class, nationality or religion. Hasn’t the antibody of goodness already started debugging the society of its evils? Does Corona stand a chance? Much as there is strife and suffering, but the strains of our best versions do hold the beacon of hope.

As the economy crashes across countries, the money diplomacy should be scorned upon. As the new sun smiles once the night of the epidemic is over, China’s Yuan diplomacy of enslaving poor countries indirectly through debt trap has to be neutralized. They should feel and understand the Dragon’s python grip around their throat and try to avoid a suffocating death. Global peace and security largely depend on China in future. If there is a democratic government in China within a decade, that will be some hope for the world. If not, God save us then! If there is democracy in China, progressive social reforms—especially the position of women—in hardbound Islamic societies, a humbler America, at an ease Europe and an India that isn’t merely in the rat race to compete against the worst to excel, we can lay the foundation for the best version of globe.

As you lie down in self isolation, don’t just fart with boredom in your living rooms or be hyperactive in bedrooms, there is an option to be the best versions of yourself. Don’t just capitulate to the lures of skin and sex. The quirk of fate gives you lots of time. The post-modernist melting crucibles aren’t teasing and testing your ready to strike candor. The scathing, sharp blade of blind competence, hypocrisy and double standards isn’t prodding you across the mucking lanes and by-lanes and sordid crossroads. The specter of running from the pillar to post isn’t staring down your neck anymore for the time being. You have the most precious commodity as per the modern parameters of human civilization: Time. Let’s rekindle the lost light of the soul. The moments are tinged with sepia-toned memories of better days our forefathers witnessed. The life was less convenient but far more joyful. The life shaped by see-saw vignettes of emotions. The times when self-righteousness was reigned in and we didn’t jostle for victory at any cost; when even the most vibrant critics didn’t lose their entire credentials, leaving enough rooms for friendly jibes even in the bleakest situations.

The sky is imbued with a pleasant and refreshing blue. The clean air is springing up with a most impassioned song. The sun is shining with a reassuring, cozy and irreplaceable look of healing and warmth. It’s the time to welcome all your deep-held softer urges to be creative, to be something more than what the circumstances have forced you into, to be a bit more than you have become. Nurture those little dreams you once held in your little palms as a child. Yank yourself off from the worm-eaten, ambiguous trajectory. Break the hard-core, cynical look of an adult and be a wide-eyed smiling child. You have been pushed and shoved and carry the ugly wrinkles of hard-fought battles. Now is the time for a Phoenix-like rise. Use the pause creatively. Learn cooking, read, write, paint, do gardening, rectify the relationships that went haywire, and let your family see the best version of yourself.

Even your pets will be ecstatic and at their slurping, coaxing best on finding you at home. The wall clock will have a mellowed baritone and slow down the time to heal moth-eaten, fragile bonds jolted by months and years of irregularities and violations of trust. Imagine the unalloyed joy dawning upon the entire family dining together, chatting over tea, watching TV and gossiping in the drawing room.

A pet dog Robo in Essex, UK went berserk with ecstasy finding the owner family at home, all of them together: perhaps an eighth wonder for the pet. He acknowledged it to the core of his innocent heart. After a prolonged torrent of wagging its tail almost the entire day to celebrate the rare event, the canine paid the cost of overzealous celebration in the form of a painful sprain in the tail. He has been prescribed painkillers for a week and the wagging instrument of celebration firmly tied. Now it has to show its love and affection only through its mellifluous eyes. But I am sure, he will find the pain worth it.

Of course this too will pass. It hardly matters. What matters most is what is left behind. I hope the best version of all and everything will be sowed like winter seeds to sprout during one fine spring!