Lessons  from the Pandemic

Speaking about  his new novel Nights of the Plague, the Nobel laureate of yester years, Orhan Pamuck says that  “the Pandemic alters the political and social scaffolding of the  nations…the subject of plague is always related  to  politics.”Pamuck’s prescience is extraordinary when viewed in the light of what had transpired during the dreadful twenty odd months of Covid that witnessed the dance of death. Pamuck says “Humanity more  or  less behaves the same way during pandemics. First there is denial.  Denial makes the numbers go up. This leads to conspiracy theories-nationalism, going inward, blaming the governments or other ethnicities.  Sometimes it leads to new governments   being formed.  Other times, the government is involved and becomes authoritarian…”

Initially in November 2019, when China reported the deadly spread of Covid, the world was complacent as it was regarded as a one off plague in the far away, distant China. It only dawned a few weeks later that the Covid virus needed no passport to travel all over the world. We in India, true to Pamuck’s prediction, were also initially in a state of denial. By the time we acknowledged its presence, the fatality count had risen up by geometric progression. The appeal to nationalism by  the PM to be responsible citizens, observe a  self  imposed curfew and clap on balconies and clang plates happened with the kind of pomp and show that we see during Indian weddings or  festivities  and made the obedient  masses collect on the streets and hysterically clap and clang thalis(plates)  to frighten the virus to bolt out of India. But it didn’t serve the purpose; on the contrary it reversed the whole point of the exercise of self imposed lockdown by crowd’s close proximity causing still more rapid virus transmission.

Again Pamuck’s anxiety about the health of democracy has proved true as the coronavirus outbreak has globally challenged human rights. According to Freedom  House report, “the COVID-19 pandemic has fuelled a crisis for democracy around the world. Since the Corona virus outbreak began, the condition of democracy and human rights has grown worse in 80 countries. Governments have responded by engaging in abuses of power, silencing their critics, and weakening or shuttering important institutions, often undermining the very systems of accountability needed to protect public health.’  Pamuck is in line with the Israeli writer and intellectual, Yuval  Harari’s prediction about the post-Pandemic world that  its critical influence will be felt  on health care systems, where its impact on the ruling governments  will lead  to totalitarian surveillance through collection of personal data of every individual ostensibly  to provide  them   with better protection against the Virus. On the social front, the easy availability of personal data –especially related to health -can adversely impact life insurance premium, employability and even marriage.

 I like every other person waited for the day when masks would become a thing of the past and the world would move to normalcy as it did  after the Spanish flu exactly a century ago. Those born after 1920  when the Spanish flu ended , do not have any idea of what  those two nightmarish years (1919-1920)- that accounted for 50 million deaths- were like! All the havoc caused during the current pandemic years bear close similarity to the Spanish flu years except that the fatality is much larger than before.  Covid has once again brought to the fore the awareness of  Man as a Lilliputian pitched against a tiny virus that was gargantuan in its lethality. All the advancement in Medical Sciences and technological innovation could not put the present day Humpty Dumptys together again. The Virus has had its last laugh, becoming the cruellest leveller of mankind.

But all the resolutions and determinations that kicked in while experiencing the ruthless savagery of Covid are now gradually becoming a thing of the past as we blithely ignore  the lessons we absorbed while we were incarcerated within the four walls  of the house.  We have now turned deaf to the eerie silence of the walls that remind us of the countless deaths that struck every household, of orphaned children and devastated families, of forced isolation accelerating cognitive decline and damage to our physical health. For a short period  it had jolted us out of complacency  and reckless  self-centric life of the pre-pandemic YOLO years, when we lived and breathed the idea  that since  you  live  only  once, live life to the fullest. While it  is okay to let oneself loose and have some fun, the YOLO generation  is  using this logic as an  excuse to fully engage once again  in  doing things that are enjoyable and exciting,  however silly and  inane they are.  In the process of total enjoyment we have once again fallen back to self centrism, with no care or feeling for fellow beings and unmindful of the waste and devastation of our environment and its resources.

The pandemic brought us –albeit for a short interval-to appreciate the wisdom of a Gandhian way of life that stressed on minimalism, characterized  by sparseness  and simplicity. From our early days, we have been taught in our Tamil language சிறுக  கட்டி  பெருக  வாழ்-(build a small home and live King size).  But we were lured to adopt maximalism whose motto “more is  more”      that goes contrary to the philosophy of minimalism of “less  is  more.” In the years of freedom struggle and the early years of post independence   we took pride in following Gandh’s pithy advice- “waste not,  want not”. This was in the early fifties of the last century. As we moved from underdeveloped status to that of a developing nation, “waste not, want not’ became passe^’.  The waste that accrues in a present day Indian fat wedding can be measured from the trashcan filled with left- over food on the plates. But for a brief interregnum during Covid, despite the house imprisonment and barred from eating out, we readily accepted homemade food as a measure of healthy but frugal life.

But this did not last long and the deceptive lull of the first wave with people letting their hair down during the festival months resulted in the catastrophic rise of the second wave with people dying in thousands for lack of oxygen. The lessons learnt during the first wave were forgotten. The second wave raged leaving a trail of devastation.  The ominous forecast is the possibility of a third time repeat as  people have already forgotten  the two major lessons Covid had earlier taught –wear the mask and accept aloneness. The neglect of these two Covid appropriate behaviour presages fresh anxiety about the uncertainties of life and why things should not be taken for granted.

The festival season preceding the annual arrival of winter has once again turned people crazy. Today’s leading newspaper has 45 full page advertisements, excluding the half page ones that add up to another 15 pages.  The total number of pages as indicated  on top of the opening page pegs it at 88 which makes advertisements garner 2/3rds  of today’s edition. The TV channels advertise diamond and platinum rings, high quality silk sarees and dresses, high priced cars and electronic gadgets, packs of almond and pista and dry fruits ... Is it naivety on my part to wonder if we have all won Bachchan’s crorepathi show! But when I step into market and ask for a simple ‘Chaat”-the traditional savoury item sold by street vendors,  the rocketing price of 170 rs/plate make me scamper home. For the poor and the  middle class, milk, pulses, vegetables, oils have become beyond their reach as the prices have  rocketed sky high and all the sop offered by the government in terms of increased Dearness Allowance  cannot get the poor even a quarter of their daily needs. The traffic snarls with cars on the roads moving bumper to bumper, the surreptitious bursting of crackers(faking as green crackers, which was also banned by the Supreme Court)adding to the deteriorating air quality, the jostling crowds in the market without masks despite the experts’ warning indicate that lessons learnt have been forgotten. There is no thought left for the elderly, for those with co-morbidity, those with decreased lung power and for young children. In the name of tradition, which can best be defined as perpetuating the illusion of continuity, the crackers had to be burst. The unwritten advice is ‘if you have headaches, find your own aspirins’.

Life has returned to pre-pandemic days except for the poor facing even greater hardship than before. The government hails the industrial and corporate magnates for kicking in the animal spirits to show that economy is on the upswing,  but the truth is the upswing in economic activity is only for the rich, by the rich and of the rich. Animal spirits is limited to the entrepreneurs and businessmen and rich consumers who can afford mega purchases. But they are absent in the vast majority of consumers belonging to the lower strata of society who have no purchasing power.

The austerity that marked the last two Diwalis is no longer there.  Lavish parties, travel to exotic  places, frenzied shopping, exchange  of Diwali gifts from the rich to the richer and from the richer to the richest...have  replaced past austerity to present  superfluity.  As stated earlier,  we  see bombardment of advertisements  and attractive offers  to lure customers-in particular the EMI offers- to soften the blow where the product is alluring and the price is forbidding. As Santosh Desai writes:  “The Festival  of Lights is at its heart a festival of consumption”.  The Rich splurge as they have more than enough to see them through the rest  of life, the upper middleclass , to keep up with the rich Joneses makes extravagant purchases for show off/ display, while the lower classes remain in awe and despair- which hopefully should not misdirect them to trigger a social crisis. We are back to the pre pandemic days without a thought for the most disadvantaged groups that comprise the majority of our population.

Labelled as the Black Swan event, Covid has had a devastating effect on all societies and on all sectors like health, education, jobs, industry and agriculture. We in India have been exposed  to the horrific  pictures of migrant exodus walking back with their families during the hottest part of summer when lockdown was suddenly  imposed rendering them jobless in megacities far away from their native states. It had a severe impact on millions of low-income migrant workers and daily-wage earners. Many charitable organizations arranged food for these migrants trudging back wearily on foot. For once even the most self centric person had empathy and felt connected to fellow humans however distant they were economically, socially and mentally. Pandemic did kindle-at times even unobtrusively-fellow feeling as everyone had lived through the pandemic. The shared experience of loss of beloved ones, the trauma of  a long period of isolation,  the fear and anxiety about contracting Covid despite the protective vaccination,  the job cuts and job losses, and above all the absence of contact with the outside world of Nature ... made us realize the worth and value of what it is to be human.

We, in India who had escaped the deadly onslaught of the two World Wars-1914-18  and 1939-45- while the West encountered the Absurd functioning of the universe where nothing was certain, nothing could be taken for granted, nowhere  to feel safe and secure, nothing to expect, nothing to predict....in short nothingness of Man pathetically confronting the  Nothingness of the Universe -- a timeless, spaceless, dimensionless state with no features a state beyond human mind and imagination. The unequal battle between the two forms of nothingness made the Western man value his worth and dignity by standing up to the Absurd without seeking crutches to support him. ‘The greatest mystery was not that we have been flung at random among the profusion of the earth and the galaxy of the stars, but that in this prison we can fashion images of ourselves sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness.’(Maurice Friedman).Even the crutches were not available. The World War brutality tells us a story of a Jewish Rabbi seeing God crouching in a dark corner. When he asks God why He is hiding, God answers cryptically: “I am tired”.

The Pandemic has now given us the awareness of the Absurd. It has struck millions of families, sparing neither the rich nor the poor in its viral sweep. It has upended the complacent, self centred life we were leading to one of acceptance that we all belong to the single family of humanity-what our Upanishads had defined as Vasudeva Kutumbakam- “The world is one family” stressing the idea that all people are connected and that we should treat others with kindness and respect, as if they belong to our own family. The notable point is the virus has shown us as one collective humanity in sharing mental and physical trauma. It mattered very little if the pandemic raged in Timbuctoo or elsewhere, for its reach was wide and  rapid as the globe had shrunk with its amazing connectivity. The need to be united and not divided in the face of a common enemy  was the key lesson we learnt from the Pandemic.  But once the pandemic has lessened its vice grip, we have returned to our old ways of fighting in the name of ideology, race, religion, status and nationality. The pandemic had for a short period fine tuned the idea  “No man is an island” and we desperately wanted to move out of the sordid confinement within the house to meet and greet fellow beings.

But now that the Pandemic is on the wane, we are back to our egotistic self, back to the sense of the centrality of “ME” defined by my material, intellectual, racial, religious status . Everyone- the ruler and the ruled, the spiritual priest and his flock, the physician and the patient, the trader and the consumer, the employer and the employed,-asserts his strength and superiority that leads to national, ideological, religious, racial and societal schism. Pandemic for all its lethality had united us with a sense of belonging to the Human race. But as it makes its final bow, it seems to take back the unity that it had installed . In its place all that remains is alienation, discord and disharmony.  The news headlines and news flashes are no longer about the lethal invasion of Covid, but about the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the sabre rattling of China against Vietnam, the new geo politics of nuclear war, the deadly conflict over hijab in Iran, the fatal conflicts in Iraq, international  economic warfare, global food crisis, climate devastation…Add to this, racial conflict, religious polarization, genocide currently on the rise all over the world. The lessons learnt during the pandemic are the only fragments humanity has to shore against its extinction.

Let us recall how the Mahabharata ended signalling the end of the Dwapara yuga. After the Kurukshetra war ended, only 12 survived that included among others the five Pandava brothers, Draupadi,Krishna and Aswathama . The Mahābhārata ends with the death of Krishna, and the subsequent end of his dynasty and ascent of the Pandava brothers to heaven.. Soon after the death of Krishna, the entire Yadava clans of Dwaraka were destroyed due to a fratricidal war.

Once again the desperate cry of Where Shall Wisdom be found is heard. This is the title of Harold Blooms brilliant book, where he refers to Wisdom literature from the Bible to twentieth-century writing, that have shaped  our thinking. Though Bloom has not included the Indian classics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, we can add them to his list from the Book of Job and Ecclesiastes; Plato and Homer; Cervantes and Shakespeare; Montaigne and Bacon; Johnson and Goethe; Emerson and Nietzsche; Freud and Proust along with the Gospel of Thomas and Saint Augustine. These are what Eliot would have defined as  “the fragments to shore against our ruin”. Bloom says these Books “teach us to accept natural limits… Reading alone will not save us or make us wise, but without it we will lapse into the death-in-life of the dumbing-down in which America now leads the world, as in all other matters.”.While Bloom refers only to America, the post Covid World of today needs his sagacious solution. Go back to books and they shall hold the mirror to the lessons taught by Covid.