As India is battling a brutal humanitarian crisis, any adjective such as 'pathetic', 'abysmal', 'horrible', 'awful', 'catastrophic' or any such word, falls short to describe the misery that has befallen upon our society. Each moment is filled with uncertainty, with fear. Fear of us being that person in the newspaper or TV who's sobbing beside a dead body of their loved one, or of someone in a PPE kit lighting the funeral pyre in a crowded crematorium. Or worse, the fear of waiting for a loved one (struggling for oxygen) to die. This fear is amplified when your loved ones aren't with you, but thousands of kilometers apart.
The front page of the Hindu (to which I subscribe, in print) is filled with only covid-related news. Every day. The forwards in Whatsapp, the video clips in Twitter, the photos in the news - they only reinforce my belief that the God of Death is himself roaming on the streets. His soldiers are everywhere in India, mocking at our preparedness, our helplessness and our surrender.
It is now increasingly believed that once covid is over, many of us will be suffering from PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder). While many of us are extremely lucky to be safe inside our homes - getting all essentials and non-essentials at the click of an app, delivered right at our doorstep, getting salary at month end, having all family members healthy and safe - majority of the population is not so lucky at all. So, every morning when I wake up, the first thing I do is to thank* that I am fortunate to be alive, to have my near ones safe, to have the means & the comfort to feed my family. (*thank the 'random probability' which resulted in me being alive.) Everything else is just secondary. Right now, not getting infected with covid is just the most important thing. So, even if the home confinement is driving us nuts, preventing the cognitive development of our toddlers & kids, and creating unusual stress & frustration, yet it is better than being at the crematorium.
Actually, I had been wanting to write on something else, but the background fear/uncertainty/anxiety in the mind is just too strong to be able to write on anything else. The ambiance is one of unavoidable gloom. Watching movies or reading books does not prevent the inevitable from happening, and doesn't slow down the spread of covid; it merely distracts us for sometime. But, as I was telling my wife an hour back, we just wait it out. Just let the time pass, and it'll hopefully be quasi-normal once again.
The Spanish flu of 1918-1920, or the Bubonic Plague of the middle ages must have been infinitely more horrible that what we're seeing now but back then, science & technology weren't even remotely as advanced as now. Awareness was quite low back then. Now, we have advanced technologies to minimize the impact. And we wouldn't even need advanced technologies to reduce the mortality; if only oxygen cylinders were available to all the patients, the death toll would have been unbelievably lower today. Most of the deaths were completely preventable, and this makes it painful to acknowledge.
Sometimes, I daydream of myself being Shukracharya, the sage/rishi of the Asuras in Vedic mythologies. He had the divine boon of being able to bring the dead back to life by virtue of the Mahamrityunjaya Mantra which he acquired from Lord Shiva as a blessing for his severe penance. I haven't done any such penance, but I do wish I could walk into the hundreds of crematoriums and cemeteries of India and many more of the world, and bring back the millions dead* back to life, from their ashes and their graves. (*dead due to covid). I really, really wish I could do that!
Would I upset the order & balance of nature? I don't think so, because most of these were fully preventable deaths, meaning, these people could have been just alive today had they gotten the oxygen or the ventilator or other support on time. It wasn't cancer or AIDS or rabies or something like that. Corona was non-existent until a year and a half back.
But I am no Shukracharya! I am just an ordinary Indian hoping to be alive at the end of the pandemic, trying to keep my family safe from covid. That's all.
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