Image: Bloomberg
Any lockdown will fail in India within a short period.
How short? I am not sure. Maybe after the first week. Or two. Or less. I don’t know. In any case, it cannot ever be total.
Why? I have some theories:
- We, as people, cannot stay home or without meeting and mingling with others, for several reasons, whether cultural upbringing, religious beliefs, social conditioning, population density (specifically urban), the evolution of our dwelling design, work style, entertainment methods, the way our daily supply chains are structured, or a dozen other explanations, or a combination of them. In effect, Indians are not built for long periods of isolation. We are not unique. I am sure the Italians and Hungarians are probably the same (I have visited and stayed in many countries and have found the people in these two to be the closest to us) but there must be many other nations and societies like this, for my own personal experience is limited as is most people’s.
- We have scant respect for law or science or even history. We think laws and rules, being human-made, are open to interpretation (ours) and applicable strictly only to other people. We think scientists don’t understand everything, which, while technically true, leads us to the false conclusion that they are therefore wholly unreliable (except in cases where we decide that they are not), while those that tell us that “science and scientists don’t understand everything” are the ones that actually do (understand everything, that is), since we assume that given that they have figured out that science does not have all the answers (just ask any Sri Sri, Ramdev, Zakir Naik, or Jaggi follower), surely they (these “spiritual gurus) must have. And of course, we don’t learn from others, believing we, and our culture, alone are/is the fount of all that is worth knowing.
- Our diets are not used to prolonged ingestion of processed, preserved food, and we have not developed a system of preserving regular, everyday food, preferring to shop on a periodic basis (urban, rural, does not matter) for food and food-related items rather than store and preserve them. This could be a function of the climatic conditions and weather patterns that we are used to on the subcontinent, or could once again be something that has other anthropological reasons, on which I cannot comment.
- Our collective mental health, as well as the physical and medical care-taking of those that need external support (elders, handicapped, infants, etc.) is largely community and family-driven, with its own complications of religion, caste, region, gender, class, etc. But suffice to say that we have not yet reached a stage in our social development where those that need to be cared for have systems and processes as part of the political, economical, and social structure we live in. Ditto, the economically dependent, the poorest of the poor. The social welfare state which India seeks to be one day is very very very far away.
- Our public services, whether transport, health, or even law enforcement is woefully inadequate even for normal times. Our doctors or nurses or police officers per million, or hospital beds or buses or km of tarred road per capita is ridiculously insufficient to serve the regular non-crisis needs of a nation, leave alone an unforeseen emergency that requires us to fight and defeat an unknown enemy. As an example, the eradication of polio (a simple enough task once we had access to the vaccine), for example, took such superhuman effort and such dedicated focus that had polio been contagious or infectious to the degree that #Covid19 is, we would have been dead in the water by now.
- We are all believers in some sort of “karma,” where, regardless of our religious faith (I have seen this across the spectrum, from caste Hindus to Dalits to Sikhs to Jains to Christians to Muslims), we all think (know?) that what has to be will be. “When the time comes, it comes.” is a belief so strongly ingrained in us that there is literally nothing you can do to scrub the mind of this “give up and give in to fate” attitude we seem to carry intrinsically. This particular point (or maybe this entire post) in itself is an example of this.
- We are too large a country. In fact, we may not even be one nation (for those who are confused about the difference in the meanings of these two may kindly research this before jumping the gun and calling me anti-national) but a confederation of peoples (which is, once again, different from a country or a nation) who are spread over such large geographic distances that they could only be managed using the de-centralised method of rule, practised by every successful “ruler” of this subcontinent over centuries of recorded history. We are, by nature a “coalition” nation. We perform best when we have a leader who is constrained by the limitations of pleasing their allies via a series of compromises, and retrained by law (both physical and human-made) from taking unilateral decisions while being forced to justify their every action by referring to consensus within professionals and experts as well as making small tweaks to satisfy individual egos. We have rarely been our best when ruled “from above.” We all love a benevolent dictator, don’t get me wrong (oh boy! do we love them!). But we bring out our best under several leaders, each equal in strength or weakness to the other. That political structure does not exist as of today. Far from it. We have possibly the worst ever structure at the top to deal with this crisis today. This is not a judgement on the BJP, mind you. Any dictatorial leader whose style is to stifle all dissent and scrub the second and third tiers of leadership of any strength and intelligence is bad for India not just in this specific crisis, but in the long run.
- It has been too long since we went through a collective crisis like a World War or a nationwide famine or recession (and thank goodness for that), and we have lost the generation that had been part of something that involved participation, action, and sacrifice from every individual…something like the freedom struggle. Indeed, we have forgotten what it is to be and act as one. It will need something devastatingly destructive (this pandemic?) to (maybe) create that sense of collective responsibility once again. Or maybe not. I do not know, but we simply do not come together as most other homogenous societies do and have done over large parts of history.
- Which brings me to the fact that we are too varied and too diverse. Unity in diversity is a nice motto and a great objective towards which we can and should move. But, we are so diverse as to make impossible all of my descriptions of “us” to apply variously, or even at all, to so many pockets and parts of this population as to make this entire post redundant. That means that there is unlikely to be a simple, elegant, one-size-fits-all solution to this problem, like any other in India. Unfortunately, all other problems do not have the same urgency and a lack of an immediate solution does not end up meaning millions of dead. So, this is going to be a real issue.
So, what is the solution? We hope for a miracle. We hope that some sort of genetic makeup in the majority of our population makes us less vulnerable to such pandemics (specifically this virus), or that we develop what scientists are calling “herd immunity” (even I am studying what this means, and trust me, it is fascinating, if you understand evolution), or that the climatic conditions in most of India now or in the near future are inimical to the survival of this virus, or a cure or vaccine is developed super-fast, produced at industrial scales double-quick, and a massive and highly efficient program is run to inoculate all of us in a short span, or something similarly magical. Frankly, I have no clue whether there is a miracle out there waiting in the wings or we’ll just have to let this wash over us and kill as many as it can before natural selection takes over and newly born humans mutate to develop immunity or whatever.
What concerns me, therefore, is not how fast this is growing or how many it will kill before it stops. I have no control over that but to sit at home and hope for a miracle.
My mind, meanwhile, is a tsunami of thoughts. No, they aren’t about learning a new instrument or mastering a language, or creating some sort of record for reading an X number of books, or bingeing on Netflix, or worrying how I am going to run my daily 5k, or working on my abs, or anything that people are talking of in my society (both IRL and online) today. These thoughts and concerns, I am sad to say, are beyond my pay grade.
What bothers me is how do I make rent. How do I pay the suppliers of food, power, telecom, and services that I use and need to survive? How do I make sure that those that are dependent on me, which list not only includes the primary ones (people directly under my employ, say my maid or driver) but also the secondary ones (their dependents) and the tertiary ones (people indirectly making a living off me, like my housing society security guard, the electrician, plumber, part-time gardener, Uber-driver, and so on) as well as the quaternary (those that are dependent on them), and so on, are able to meet their rent, travel, education, food, medical, and other survival needs?
I am already dead in the water. Most of those who are my close friends know this by now (I conveyed it to them privately over a week ago). But because I am privileged, with a supportive family, friends, education, caste, surname, class, gender, and so on, I think I can pull along. For some time. For a very short time.
What then?
P.S: I have not posted or written for some time because I simply cannot get myself to write anymore. I am too distressed and depressed at the state of affairs and too worried about my own and my family’s future. That may sound selfish, but posting on social media is literally the most narcissistic thing I can think of in these times. And I am as guilty of it as every one of the others. So, pardon this long, rambling post, but I have spent a long time alone, just thinking, and I could not but put it all together and put it out somewhere. Whether someone reads it or not is immaterial. The purpose of my writing has been, for much time now, to satisfy my desire to record my thoughts and not to engage in any debate or discussion. Maybe that isn’t healthy. Nor is smoking. But I enjoyed it (and thoroughly) for almost 30 years before giving up. Maybe, one day, I shall give this up too. Who knows. It may come, that day. It isn’t today though. I may post again soon, or maybe later, or maybe never. My fascination with social media is kind of at the end of its leash now. I might finally let it go. Like a lot of things I need to let go of. Because there are many more things far too dear to me that I need to focus on, especially given the completely new, changed world order we are going to see at the end (whenever it comes) of this crisis, in every way, and I need to prepare myself and people I love, for it. Provided, of course, I survive it.
Later edit (after the PM’s announcement and my own discussions and on-ground observations since): The current lockdown will either implode and collapse due to gradual but sure mass non-compliance and the sheer impossibility of policing an entire nation of red signal breakers and wrong-way drivers in a one-way street, or will explode and degenerate into riots and mass non-cooperation and perhaps even real violence and looting, or will be reduced to a PR exercise as it starts becoming obvious that the whole thing was just optics, given that almost zero planning, preparation, consensus, trust-building, and discussion went into it and the media will (be forced to?) show fake and selective images and videos of empty streets etc while the reality would be that life would restart as usual in most cases (bar some really visible sectors) and many influential people and industries and businesses would seek, and be granted, approvals to reopen quickly. Some really shady bank loans, subsidies, and grants (ditto massive contracts) are likely to pass under the radar in the meanwhile. There will be certain people whose debts will be settled, favours returned, and track records cleansed in the process. But then, you already knew that, didn’t you? Will I care? I am not sure anymore. Will I have the necessary bandwidth to care enough to do anything or even write about it or look for it? No. I will be too busy trying to stay alive, which was the point of this post. Kind of.
