The sound of silence
Two hundred passengers are on the flight to Bangkok, connecting on to various cities in Asia and Australia. (City changed to protect the identity of the airline). Two hundred dreams. Two hundred families waiting in different arrival halls, waiting to see their loved ones after a mindless ban on travel for two years. Two hundred hugs and kisses.
One speech by one of the heads of state, targeting the country on which the aircraft is taxiing. And two hundred dreams shattered. The aircraft taxies empty, criminally burning thousands of litres of jet fuel because of an ego clash.
Aviation is used to being grounded when there’s a terrorist attack. When a volcano erupts. When there’s a deadly or not so deadly virus. All criminal to the industry, but we are used to it.
But this? Shamelessly clamping down on an individuals freedom of movement because of an ego tussle between two heads of state? That’s a new low, even for a government that I thought could never go lower than shamelessly beating up its citizens on the roads simply because they went out looking for food or their daily wages.
We are experts in protesting when the government clamps down on religious freedoms. Social media is lit ablaze when the government bans a particular kind of meat. But when it infringes on the basic fundamental rights of the entire population, the silence is deafening.
They say that we get the government we deserve. But when we give more power to the government with our silence, that’s when we’re going down a slippery slope from which there’s no return.
The food chain of a lockdown
This post is inspired by a tweet I saw.
The food chain
Are we saying that only our lives matter? What about the lives of the farmers and the poultry farmers giving us our daily meals? Or the truck drivers transporting these essential commodities? Or the grocery store owners? Swiggy Zomato and Doordash delivery workers? Amazon delivery boys? Airline crew, airline cargo loaders? Worse, our part time maids coming into the high rise apartment complexes? And the bottom of the food chain – Construction workers, workers building the Bangalore metro system – Is that very essential at this point?
Of course the narrative will be that the fewer people on the road, the lesser the chance of an infection and hence the hospital system will not be overwhelmed. Theoretically true, but in practice, this myth is destroyed below.
But the more important question is, if these people are working and on the roads, isn’t their chance of getting infected and dying from the infection higher than if they stay at home? Or are they immune to death by Covid? I don’t remember seeing the memo on vaccinating these guys along with the doctors.
Myth – The lockdown reduces numbers
In March 2020, India imposed what is considered the strictest lockdown in the world. No factories. No truck movement. Did the numbers collapse? Did the curve flatten like a breast reduction surgery?
26 Mar 2020 India reported 70 new cases, roughly the pink arrow below
15 Apr 2020 835 new cases
4 May 2020 4000 new cases
India unlocked the second last fortress on October 5th 2020 – Cinema halls. That’s roughly near the green arrow below.
Correlation between lockdown and cases? Its like saying if the Mumbai Indians perform well in the Indian Premier League, cases will fall and if they perform badly, cases will rise. Mumbai Indians won the IPL roughly near the green arrow and performed badly roughly near the orange arrow.
What IS the correlation between lockdown and cases? Nothing. The virus has a path of its own, and we don’t know enough on how it spreads. Look at the graph below. Is there a correlation? There may be, there may not be. But looking for a pattern to fit a graph and acting on that pattern is a huge folly.
Salaries
Let’s run an experiment. If the government dictates that the tax slab for all salaries changes to a flat 99% for the period of the lockdown only. For everyone across the country. This is to walk the talk that “We’re all in this together”. This includes the government officials who sign on the dotted line extending the lockdown. But it’ll apply as long as any business is shut, even if it’s one category of business.
How long will lockdowns last? How many people will support the lockdowns, knowing that as long as the last bastion of the lockdown is not removed, the last business is not allowed to open, not a penny will drop into my account?
There is no other way
There is no other way?
Let’s look at road accidents. We have speed limits and speed breakers to prevent accidents. We don’t shut the road transport system to prevent deaths due to road accidents. By the way, road accidents claim more lives every year as compared to Covid.
Let’s look at smoking. We prevent smoking in public. We show horrible images before movies in cinema halls. We don’t ban cigarettes completely to prevent cancer deaths from smoking.
Let’s look at alcohol. We control who sells alcohol and we tax it as much as we tax Coca Cola and petrol. We don’t ban alcohol completely to prevent alcohol related deaths and accidents, or alcohol related social issues. In fact, we print “Alcohol is injurious to health” but we still allow it to be sold.
There is no other way?
The lockdown paradox
Covid is a deadly disease. May or may not be as deadly as cancer, heart diseases and diabetes in terms of absolute numbers. May not be as deadly as road accidents. But it is deadly and it will remain deadly.
But here’s the paradox. People know it’s deadly and people know they have to take as many precautions as practically and as cost effective as possible.
But the irony and the paradox is that we need a lockdown to force these people to stay at home. We don’t give them the freedom and liberty to decide? And let them assess the risk on their own versus the cost to their livelihood?
Of course the narrative has been cleverly manipulated to say that even if you go out, you could be asymptomatic and you could spread it to others and you are “irresponsible”. Sneaky. But here’s where it links to each section above:
- I can die of a road accident just by standing still and having a bus mow me down. Can I have the freedom to weigh the risks and step out on the road?
- There’s no correlation between lockdowns and cases. Why are you shutting me inside the house?
- Don’t you care about the farmers, delivery boys and grocery store owners? How are they exempt from the lockdown?
We alow “irresponsible ” drivers on the road who kill. I think it’s time we allow “irresponsible” people to get on to the road to earn their daily bread.
My business is essential to me. A salon owners business is essential to him or her. Just because we can’t run our businesses on Zoom, it doesn’t make our businesses less essential.
We know
We knew that the earth was flat. We knew that the Sun revolved around the Earth. All our scientific evidence was built around this. And we believed this for centuries till it was proved otherwise.
“Science” has always built theories based on what is the most obvious fact to believe. Today, just because we have snazzy cellphones and self driving cars, it doesn’t mean that what Science “knows” today is the truth. In a relative sense, every era thought they knew it all. But in retrospect, after years or centuries of critical questioning, we have changed what we “know”. And years from now, or centuries from now, we may look back at the Coronavirus pandemic and diametrically change what we “know”.
That has started happening to a small extent. Last year, we were told to “Stay Home, Stay Safe”. It was an “Earth is flat” moment. Today, the WHO and the CDC have stated that airborne transmission is one of the main causes of Covid transmission. There was no fanfare for this announcement, because it completely negates the “Stay Home Stay Safe” chant. Staying home, especially in poorly ventilated homes which most of India lives in, will spread the virus faster. Especially if you close the windows. Today, we’re told that the risk of outdoor transmission is very very low.
There was so much fanfare about bathing ourselves in sanitizer last year. This year? Oops, the Earth revolves around the Sun and sanitizer won’t help because surface transmission risk is very low.
We don’t know much about the virus. We don’t know who gets infected (especially when a few members of a household are infected and the others are not). We don’t know who it causes serious problems for. And we don’t know who it kills. Which is not surprising. With all our glitzy phones and putting a man on the moon, we don’t know what causes cancer. We don’t know what causes diabetes. We don’t know who it kills. We don’t have a cure.
What is also not surprising is that we’re not critically questioning what is being presented to us. The deaths are tragic. But is there a link to anything? Is there a link that some of the deaths are linked to the vaccine throwing clots? Will a less aggressive vaccine rollout reduce this?
Is there a link to staying at home or wearing a mask and getting infected? We don’t know. Is there a link to co-morbidities and getting infected seriously from the virus? We don’t know.
But we have to question. The government. The media. On statistics. On links. The media publishes reports to suit their commercial interests. To bait more clicks, to increase readership. We should demand statistics that give us a clearer picture. We are so dependent on the media for our world view that we have stopped thinking for ourselves.
We have stopped questioning, because we are bombarded with a barrage of information. By the time we digest one bit, the phone buzzes with the next bit. There is no time to question. Questioning is what has led to progress, not blind belief.
What do we know? That Covid19 is a deadly disease that may or may not affect us. It may or may not get us hospitalized. It may or may not kill us. Like cancer. Like diabetes. Like a heart attack. But a new way. With a risk associated with it similar to a car accident or an alcohol death, less than cancer and heart attacks. And till we find out that the Earth is round, we have to get on with our lives. Safely. And hope that the Russian Roulette doesn’t hit us or our loved ones.
Random thoughts
What could be happening
What the government should be doing
What the government is actually doing
The “Let them eat cake” moment of the Indian government
From Pearls Before Swine
Just once
Just once. Come out of your houses. See for yourselves that most of the world is normal. People are on the streets. Kids are frolicking in the play areas. Restaurants are full. Malls are buzzing.
Just once. Go to that restaurant you used to. To see for yourselves that the virus is not crawling all over the tables. And the chances of you catching the virus are very low. And the chances of you surviving the virus if you catch it are close to 100%.
Just once. Take the dust off those designer dresses. Go to the pub like you used to. And see for yourself that there’s a long line of people waiting to get in. And once you’re in, dance like there’s no tomorrow.
Just once. Go to the cinema hall. And figure out for yourself that you’re not going to catch the virus just because you enjoyed a movie.
Just once. Get out of your pajamas. Get back to office. To partake in the office politics. Or the office gossip about the new hire. Or enjoying an office lunch on company expense. Or get back to that office romance and flirting.
Just once. Get back to school. Because learning is more than just staring at an MS Teams screen. You have the rest if your life to do that. Play in the dusty fields.
Just once. Go shopping. It’s no fun to shop online, and not send selfies from the dressing room to your girlfriends. And feel the soft fabric on your fingers or the jewelry on your neck.
Just once. Go for that massage. Or get your hair done. Look good. Feel good.
Just once. Travel. Feel the sand on your bare feet. Visit friends. Visit relatives. Hug.
Just once. Seven billion people doing this will start rebuilding the world.
Rebuilding the emotions and the human connections. The economy will fall into place automatically.
Who is answerable?
We opened restaurants on June 8th. No vaccine.
We opened gyms on August 1st. No vaccine.
We removed the mandatory quarantine in Karnataka on August 25th. No vaccine.
Forget asking why we didn’t do this on March 24th. But can’t we, as a society, ask why we’re not opening everything today? Are we, as a society, blind to the obvious?
We live in an age which where we don’t need a reason to do things. For our consumerism. In the 1990s and 2000s we needed a reason to fly. A reason to eat out. And a reason to shop for those new clothes. A festival. A wedding. That once in two years vacation. Or the once in two years visit to the parents or siblings.
Low cost carriers and online travel portals changed that. As did the mushrooming of restaurants and pubs across the cities. Amazon and the multinational brick and mortar shops changed our shopping habits. Startups and sunrise industries pushed up the salary levels and the traditional industries had to match, leading to an increase in disposable income.
And soon, we didn’t need a reason. Felt like traveling over the long weekend? Book a flight on Thursday. Book the hotel when you land in Goa. Dining out? Yes, just because it’s a Friday. Drinking out? Sure, it’s a Saturday and we can Uber it back. New clothes? Yes, because it’s a Sunday. Creating a virtuous cycle of enterprises mushrooming and fueling demand.
And now, every day that we delay opening up completely leads to a mothballing of a few of those enterprises. Every day. It’s not an elitist view. Your tourism money helps fund the baggage loader at the airport who probably earns INR 15000 per month. As it fuels the tourist guide at the Taj Mahal and the tea shop outside, earning a hundred rupees from your visit. Ask the hundred hawkers outside Brindavan Gardens who have shut shop because a government made up of sixth standard failures, a government whom we cannot trust even in the best of times, has decided so.
Opening up everything tomorrow will save some of those businesses that have managed to survive. Which begs the question
This is not a case of who is answerable for that bad road outside your apartment complex. No one is. This is not a case of who is answerable for the erratic electricity supply to factories. No one is.
This is a case of who is answerable for destroying millions of livelihoods. Destroying our right to live the way we want to. Sadly, no one is.
And worse. No one is asking the questions.
Gaslighting a population
Gaslighting. The term originates in the psychological manipulation of a victim by her husband in Patrick Hamilton’s play Gas Light. In the play, the husband attempts to convince his wife and that she is insane by manipulating small elements of their environment such as the brightness of the light, and insists that she is delusional when she points out these changes. Today, 82 years after the play was first staged, we have allowed an entire population to be gaslighted.
What comes to your mind when you hear the word “racist”? Repulsed? Mortification? Like a jolt of electricity. Society has been conditioned, rightly or wrongly, to believe that certain words, certain concepts and races are repulsive, dangerous or anathema to society as a whole.
Across history, entities have exploited the fact that the psychology of a group of individuals is diametrically different from the psychology of the individuals when alone. Religion has always told us that homosexuality is evil. Political leaders have exploited groupthink and have exterminated entire races, making the majority of the population believe that it was for their good. With social media, the task of gaslighting a population has become that much easier. A crowd behaves with more sense of reflex and less of intelligence, mimicking our forefathers from the stone age rather than reflecting the sophistication of the society we live in today.
The self inflicted pandemic was a perfect breeding ground for governments to impose control. To get their populations in line. If homosexuality or untouchability was a theme to cause repulsion, it’s now the mask. Wear it, you’re a social hero. Don’t wear it, you’re responsible for a second wave, socially irresponsible and putting the entire population at risk. So why the mask? Where did the narrative change from “Stay at home for two weeks to flatten the curve” to “Wear a mask, save lives”?
It’s been five months. Most governments have realized that their initial bravado of locking down not only fell flat, it caused a level of social and economic destruction that has never been seen before in the world. Admitting this would be disastrous for their image.
The solution? Change the narrative and gaslight the population on the virtues of a masked crusader. Turn neighbors against one another. Create enough of a stigma about this new version of the common cold (yes the common cold is a Coronavirus), create a chasm in society. So we focus on people not wearing masks instead of the colossal failure of the government in doing what we’ve employed them to do – Protect our livelihoods.
We have even forgotten that we have employed them with every rupee of tax money from blood, sweat and tears that any tax paying person has shed. We have allowed the state to take control of our property, our rights and our freedom. We have allowed commercial enterprises to suffer and shut down, forgetting that it is this institution that has spread prosperity and development to billions around the world.
Entire populations have been entranced by the virality of this mass hysteria, creating a raging fire of public opinion that engulfs any dissenting view. We celebrate on the streets when Article 377 is revoked. But we are hypnotized into accepting a serious infringement into our basic fundamental rights. Of stepping out. Of hugging our grandparents. Of earning a livelihood. Of choosing how we breathe. We light candles to protest against Nirbhayas horrific rape. But our moral fabric has been corrupted to such an extent to remain silent, even support, when there is a rape of our freedoms, a rape of free enterprise.
The irony – we have converted locked down individuals into a hypnotized herd using social media. Lockdowners have crafted a social structure where every individual treats everyone as a deadly contagion. In spite of data over five months showing that only 0.003% of the population has succumbed to the virus, we still think that standing closer than six feet suddenly makes a disease appear and spread.
We need an anti lock down movement. We need immunity against the mass hypnotism. We have to go cold turkey against the fear and the numbers spreading in social media, and voice our individual opinion and get enough individuals to voice their opinions to outshout the Twitter mob. However unfashionable it may be, we should be uncompromising in our fight for our freedom, our rights, the rights of free enterprise. No freedom has ever been won without a fight, and as absurd as it may sound, we have been enslaved in the twenty first century. Politics has entered medicine for the first time. Who knows what they’ll attack next?
We have to realize what our life is worth, and how we want to live it. No one can control that. No one should be allowed to control that. Not the government. Not the media. No one.
Have we turned the corner?
March 2020: 500 cases in India. Cases define the entire district as a red zone. Tom Hanks tests positive.
April 2020: 10000 cases in India. Restaurants closed. Kids not allowed to play. Maids and drivers not allowed inside. Migrants walk thousands of kilometers. Boris Johnson tests positive.
May 2020: 50000 cases in India. Cases define a ward as a red zone. Trains and flights resume carrying migrants and those who are stranded. Maids and drivers resume work.
June 2020: 5 lakh cases in India. Cases mean the floor of the apartment, one floor above and below sealed. Restaurants open up. Kids come down to play. Our apartment freaks out when there’s a case in the vicinity. Jyotiraditya Scindia tests positive.
July 2020: 15 lakh cases in India. Cases mean the floor of the apartment sealed. People begin to socialize. Business as usual when there’s a case in our apartment complex. Amitabh and Abhishek Bachchan tests positive.
Can you, just for five minutes, pause to think if we’ve turned the corner on this pandemic?
Have we, subconsciously or consciously, realized that we cannot escape getting infected. If not today, it’ll be tomorrow. Our building encouraged shopping for groceries only at the in house store as the safest mode of shopping. Till the store owner was tested positive. Sitting at home will not prevent the infection. Look around you. How many Stay at Home or Masked friends were tested positive?
Most people, from, Tom Hanks to the Bachchan family recover. There is no medical development. And yet we have moved from sealing the district to sealing the flat. We have moved from not ordering on Uber Eats, to eating at restaurants. We have taken baby steps in May, looked beyond the walls of our complex, to see that the world is actually getting back to normal.
And ask ourselves the most important question? Have we turned the corner on the pandemic? Have we accepted it as part of our lives, just like we’ve accepted road accidents and cancer? Are we getting immune to the concept just like we’re immune to pollution, global hunger and poverty, two out of the three already increasing exponentially in the last four months?
We’re still taking baby steps. But we’re moving towards normalcy. We’ve stopped counting world cases, India cases and now Bangalore cases. The new cases will increase, the deaths will increase at the a slower rate, but we’re slowly realizing that there’s nothing we can do about it. Not hiding at home, not masking ourselves, nothing.
What we need to realize is that life must go on. What the governments need to realize is that they just need to improve the medical processes. People die. They just need to try to delay that as much as they can. It’s just that we have a new cause of death.
We have turned the corner on social discussions. China. TikTok. Rajasthan. Nepotism in Bollywood.
We have turned the corner in India. And we’re just a few steps away from reaching where Europe and Singapore are in terms of social and economic interaction. Those few steps may take a few months, but we’ve started walking in that direction. Its ironic that we shut ourselves at 500 cases and we’re loosening up at 1.5 million cases.
We’ve turned the corner on work. A two month cocktail of Zoom meetings wearing a jacket and underwear, Netflix and waking up late and we realize we need the social interactions at work. We need the office politics and the work travel to escape the mundane.
We have begun the escape. A few more weeks and we will see light.
Remember
What makes us human? Is it just opposable thumbs? Or is it more than that? Much more?
Remember when, not so long ago, we connected with people? Not through the screens of our gadgets, but through the twinkle of our eyes. Where we used to see emotions on faces, not judge emotions through emoticons?
Moving to the cocoon of an alternate reality of a movie in a theater? It could be an attack on our senses if it was a Ram Gopal Varma film, or it could caress our senses if it was a Mani Ratnam film. Nibbling on popcorn and nachos, tears rolling down our eyes or bursting with laughter.
Glasses of wine clinking before the first sip of wine swirling in our mouth. The hug and light kiss after a romantic candlelight dinner. The butterflies in your stomach before a first date. Or the broken heart after a last date.
Remember, when not so long ago, birthdays meant kids running around and playing, with their laughter sounding like the peal of bells or their screaming sounding like nails on a blackboard? When school meant meeting friends and fighting on the floor kicking up the dust? The excitement of seeing your son or daughter perform in the school play and clapping like there’s no tomorrow?
Remember the excitement of gossip fresh off the oven during a girl’s night out? Shopping and a spa treatment together? Or slapping backs holding beers during a guy’s night out when a Chennai Super Kings wicket falls? (Assuming of course you’re an RCB fan).
When the romance of travel began with the excitement of packing a suitcase? The smells and sounds inside an aircraft. The anticipation when the wheels lift off the tarmac. And the feeling when the wheels touch down back at home, signaling back to work and back to school.
Remember walking down Marine Drive with the spray of the ocean in the monsoon drenching our faces with our hair flying across? And tasting the pani puris from the street vendors.
That’s what makes us human. Being a social animal, not a social media animal. Being socially close, not maintaining social distance. Crying, laughing, hugging, loving and living.
Its time we became human again. Off with our masks and on with our smiles. The virus is here to stay. But we are here to live.
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