A few days back I wrote about the first anniversary of lockdown that resonated
with a great level of positivity. The touch of human kindness was one of the
positives many of us experienced this last one year and it
provided the much needed mitigation from
the unbearable heaviness of house
arrest. When I wrote that piece, the Corona wave afflicting the country had started
waning almost to negligible level and there was palpable relief that the corona
year like the 1918 pandemic flu could be
confined to the annals of history as an instance of centenary recurrence.. Even
octogenarians like me inching into our last phase of life began to relax and
ventured to step out for a walk in the park. To us, who for a year had wrestled
with despair and despondency, the timely news of vaccination gave further relief
and once again we began to view daily sunshine as a glorious birth and felt a spring in our stride that had become slow and weak with advancing years almost in a state of
corona paralysis. The sudden fall in the corona positive graph made us feel like
Wordsworth’s Leech Gatherer, bent double with age, with a resolve not to give in to despair and reaffirm
life with courage and dignity. With the song “We shall overcome” on our lips,
buoyed with hope and optimism we felt that together old and young we shall return to pre Corona times,
hopefully a little chastened and subdued.. But as the saying goes small showers last long and sudden storms are short This sudden
welcome interlude barely lasted for a couple of weeks as the aggressive bug once
more reared its more vigorous and more lethal head We are back where we were a
year ago.
We had this time brought it on ourselves by lowering the bar through mindless
complacency, forgetting all the lessons of COVID appropriate behaviour. Vaccine
hesitancy compounded by vaccine shortage further fuelled the Corona fire and what looked like
embers a few weeks back has now burst into a huge conflagration worse than the
Amazon forest fire of 2020. .
We are back to our barracks except that now it is self imposed and not
an official incarceration as the governments are caught in a catch 22
situation- to lockdown or not to lockdown. The PM exhorts the nation to observe
four days of ‘tika utsav’ ( vaccination festival).What an irony! These four
days harbinger the New Year in many parts of the nation that follow the solar
calendar- ‘Puthandu’ in Tamilnadu,
‘Baisaki’ in Punjab, ‘Bihu’ in Assam, ‘Vishu’ in Kerala, ‘ Pana Sankranti’ in Odisha, ‘Poila Boishakh’ in Bengal. Close to
these New Year Day the states following lunar calendar celebrate ‘ Ugadi’ in Andra Pradesh, Karnataka and Telengana and ‘Gudi Padwa’ in
Maharashtra.
Now our PM has added one more utsav- Tika Utsav to celebrate these days
with a prick of the needle. Probably in his inimitable mesmerizing voice, he
should have given us Modi music like Modi dance of clanging the thalis last year- and sing
“Virus, Virus, go away, /Don’t you dare come another day, we want to celebrate
our prick.”
The nation has become delirious with the PM’s suggestion. Camps and
Centres are set up all over the states and instead of summer sherbet in our
hands, we have Covaxin in our arms. This
is Modimagic – a new term to be added to the numerous list –Moditva, Modinnomics,
Modisarkar, Modi dance, Modi music Modi
upadesh,....Modi is the Man of the moment. Different strokes for different
times- He presents different images to different people – Modi, the Modernist,
Modi, the Seer, Modi the Orator, Modi
the Silent sage in a cave, Modi, the Prophet
,Modi, the Guru, Modi the Hugger, Modi, the Charmer, Modi, the Saviour Modi,
the friend of billionaires, Modi the protector of the poor, Modi, the
heartthrob of the Bollywood, Modi, the patron of the Media... He is a poet in
Hindi (like his illustrious predecessor Shri Vajpayeeji) a twitterate in
English, a lover of the birds and animals (like the first PM of India).... he has
demolished Lutyens elite culture and remodelled elitism with his own brand of hinglish elitism. He is Rama
and Krishna to the North Indians and Gujaratis, he is Ramakrishna Paramahansa
and Tagore for the Bengalis, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu for the Oriyas, Periyar for the insular parochial Tamils ,
Parasurama for the Keralites, ...
Modi hai to mumkin hai... Yes, his tika utsav irrespective of vaccine
availability is the reboot mantra contra reversal to the second, third,
fourth,.... waves of corona dance. The unbearable heaviness of the corona
recurrence has been made bearable lightness thanks to Modi mantra Tika Utsav
