Reboot Contra Reversal

 

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