A prayer for my grandchildren

There was an Isaac Asimov science fiction story which spoke about a time in the future when technology had ‘advanced’ so much that people had stopped going out of doors into the open entirely. Every house, every building in the city was equipped with a very sophisticated contraption colloquially called a ‘door’, on which you pressed some buttons and you were instantly transported, ‘Beam us up, Scotty’ fashion, from one hermetically sealed, completely sanitized, closed environment – such as your own house – to another, whether it be your school, office, a shopping mall, a friend’s house or a hospital. It goes without saying that there were no parks any more, and nobody dreamt of going to an open-air theatre or stadium. This had been going on for several generations, until people had quite forgotten what the outside was like: all that remained in their minds was an intense horror based upon vague myths about how poisonous, how polluted, how mortally dangerous the great outdoors were.

Now there was this little boy who was sick and tired of living indoors all the time, until his mummy thought he was seriously unhinged, and got a number of doctors to try and cure him, but all in vain. Then one day a tutor came to teach him at home. This man was a poet, a dreamer, someone who knew a lot of history (as distinct from myths) – naturally, someone most people thought was more than a little crazy. By and by he persuaded the little boy that not only was it possible and none too dangerous to venture outdoors physically, without using the ‘door’, but it could actually be a wonderful adventure. So one day when mummy was not around, the two of them actually did the unthinkable. To his unspeakable delight, the little boy found out the wonder and thrill of sunshine and wind and rain and butterflies and birdsong and running  about barefoot in the grass, and realized what he had been missing for so long, thanks to the ‘wisdom’ of his ancestors, and all the ‘progress’ that mankind had made.

In another story written in the same vein, the same Asimov wrote presciently about children learning everything alone at home from robot teachers, to wit, computers, and communicating with other children, even close neighbours, mostly by telephone. Until, while doing a history lesson, one little boy found out and told his dearest friend about places called ‘schools’ that existed in very ancient times, where teachers were human beings with all their quirks, comical faults, pathetic follies and a few loveable qualities, where hundreds of children went together and made friends, played pranks and games, laughed and shared meals and did so many other things together. The two little boys sigh over the knowledge, and over the fun their ancestors used to have in the process of getting educated. That is the name of the story, The fun they had.

If my blessings count for anything, my grandchildren will not miss out on all that fun. Ever. 

P.S., June 29: Imagine, the young smart-alecks among my readers, especially those who think the world has 'advanced' greatly in the last twenty years, that these stories were written more than half a century ago!

Anticipating Unlock 2.0

Several times now in my town wild terror spread with the news (spread mostly by word of mouth or social media) that one or two local people had died of CoViD 19; every time they turned out to be fake. Noting the panic in people’s voices and eyes, it was evident that even that was no reassurance for them at all: mere mention that a handful of people had been infected was received with the same kind of consternation and dismay as though hundreds had actually died overnight. Again and again I asked people – adults, mind you, supposedly educated adults, too: ‘How many among your family members, neighbours, friends, relatives and colleagues have died of this disease?’ and every time they were forced to admit that the number was zero; when I asked them next whether they knew some among family, neighbours, friends, relatives and colleagues who had died of cancer or in traffic accidents, they all admitted they knew lots of such. When I next asked them ‘So why this kind of terror?’ they all sheepishly dropped their eyes and mumbled incoherently. They had no idea why.

There is some reason to hope now that at long last people at the highest levels of government have begun to realize what terrible damage this mindless panic has caused. I watched the PM’s June 17 message to CMs countrywide on YouTube (see here), and he himself, no less, has stressed certain things that I have been saying right from the beginning: 1) the infection and death toll, given India’s population and population density, have been small and very small respectively, 2) a majority of infected people are recovering, 3) for most infected people, the disease is mild or completely asymptomatic, 4) the stigma and unreasoning fear associated with infection has to be removed, 5) the vast majority of infections have occurred in just a few large cities. I hope that this new campaign, this effort to remove the mindless, blind, completely pointless terror will be given momentum in the days to come. That ought to be the main thrust of Unlock 2.0, as and when it happens. By the time it is successfully done, people should have learnt to live with CoViD as just another not too serious disease, and therefore without unreasoning, all-pervasive panic.

Right now, I cannot say what makes me laugh louder with contempt and despair: people walking around with masks hanging from their ears, as though the very presence of the mask will be enough to save them, wearing not needed, or people driving alone inside air conditioned cars, masks tightly in place. ‘Educated’ people, too. Will I ever be able to treat such educated people as adults again, leave alone respect them?

Maybe we can start really unlocking?

So which is your favoured expression, Lockdown 5.0 or Unlock 1.0?

I consider myself among the most fortunate of men in India today. I live in my own house, my loved ones are around me, I have enough to eat, nobody in my immediate family is seriously ill at the time of writing (touch wood!), I can go out for a walk or a bicycle ride or a car drive every day.  And this lockdown has happened towards the fag end of my working life, when I don’t really have to strain every nerve and sinew to make a living and provide for the distant future any more. I guess that puts me among the luckiest 0.01 per cent of the population (that’s one-ten thousandth for the numerically challenged. I have discovered that far more people are like that than would care to admit, but more of that below).

Therefore I have time to look around me, and wonder, and commiserate, and feel terribly, helplessly guilty. I wish this country had been so organized and governed that in any serious crisis, the poorest and least secure did not always have to bear the heaviest part of the burden, always… some people have been walking home for hundreds of kilometers, starving, giving birth and dying on the way, or being treated like dogs by fellow humans (!); others have been transporting pet dogs in chartered aircraft across the country. At my age, after having seen it all, I now know that there are only two great miseries: to be poor while one is alive, and to die a slow, painful, lonely death at last. Like so many times before in history, this pandemic has shown us that for the rich and comfortably off, it is at worst just a nuisance (they have to postpone parties); for all others, it is a true tragedy. Only, in this country they bear it quietly. It is a great privilege if we just let them survive.

The lockdown need not have been imposed with four hours’ notice: of that I am now sure. Given ten days to go home, not only would millions have suffered much less and needlessly; it is very difficult to argue that ten extra days would have spread the disease like wildfire in those early days. They are coming home by the millions anyway, simply because they cannot be held back any longer, and it is now, when the government is becoming increasingly sure that further continuation of the lockdown would spell irreversible disaster for the economy, that the scourge is spreading in really significant numbers. What painful irony!

I have been talking to old boys across the globe: in New Zealand and Germany, the UK and the USA, and nowhere have they taken such draconian clampdown measures as here, though the numbers of infected and killed are proportionately much higher in several of those countries. I shall not quarrel with our great experts and statesmen: perhaps it was absolutely necessary, in a densely packed and gregarious country like ours, to spread a wild panic in order to lock people up in their homes for a prolonged period of time? But one thing I quietly predicted in my own circle was that it would be very hard to put the genie back into the bottle, and that has been vindicated. The mass media – even worse, the ‘social’ media – have been doing us a very great disservice by fanning the flames of fear night and day: so many are being infected, so many are dying, sab khatam ho jayega, koi nahi bachega!...

Very muted voices in high government and business circles are beginning to mumble, at long last, that ‘we shall have to live with this virus for a long time’ (meaning that it would be wise to start shrugging off the panic), and even urging whoever is listening to consider that the numbers should give us reason for cheer rather than gloom. We should not be comparing our numbers with those of tiny nations like Sweden and Italy (honestly, how many ‘educated’ Indians know that the city of Mumbai houses twice as many people as the whole country called Sweden, and that Italy is home to only about two-thirds as many people as the state of West Bengal?); and if we consider the USA, remembering that our population is four and a half times theirs in a land only one-third their size, simple proportionality should have meant that the number of infected in India should have been 5 to 6 million at least by now, and the number of dead, 5-6,00,000. What have we got instead, over the same three month period? Going by today’s numbers on Google, slightly more than one quarter million infected, and slightly more than 7,000 dead. Just stop trembling and think… aren’t we among the luckiest countries in the world? (and I only now mention that if the disease had struck as hard here as in the US, then, given our health care facilities and administrative efficiency, the figures should have actually been far higher than merely proportional – why not 20 million infected and a million dead already? Such things have happened again and again before: it is simply that we have forgotten all our history!) Sure, things are going to get worse before they get better: it is entirely probable that by the time the crisis begins to fade (say by Diwali time, early October), we might have two or three million infected and 40-50,000 dead – including me, as I calmly wrote in an earlier blogpost – my point is, those numbers would still be little more than a drop in the ocean that is India: there are about 27 million births and 10 million deaths per year under normal circumstances! (Google will assure you about all these figures). So isn’t it time we started thinking of other things?

I have been reading of Tudor England, when people lost dearly loved ones every now and then to the plague, and still went about their business as though nothing much was wrong, and I have been re-reading Kenneth Anderson’s hunting stories from the 1950s, and recalling stories told by my grandfather from the days of his childhood, meaning the 1920s, when the vast majority of Indians lived in vastly harsher and more dangerous circumstances, when sudden hurt, loss and death were far closer permanent fellow travellers for most people than today, and I marvel at the fortitude of our forebearers. Were they lesser human beings, or greater? And if we are truly becoming weaker as a species at an accelerating pace, are we going to survive for very much longer? Would the Great Wall of China or the Pyramids of Egypt or the Taj Mahal have been built, vast business organizations created, continents conquered, the most magnificent of music and literature written and the greatest scientific breakthroughs made if we had always lived locked away in little sanitised closets wearing masks and gloves waiting, trembling, for Death to come and take us away?

And my mind keeps drifting back obsessively to the wizened old woman who comes to beg at my door once every few days. Her daughter stays at home with the babies, and the crone will go about in this sweltering heat under a blazing sun until she thinks she has collected enough money to buy the minimum necessities for the day, so that she can go home and her daughter can begin to cook the sparest of meals for all of them to keep body and soul together. In a daze of despair, I think of so many things. Nobody cares for the most wretched of the earth, who don’t even have Aadhar cards and ration cards which might fetch them the occasional doles of rice and lentils. And then I remember females who believe that buying shoes and learning nail art are among the most important things in life, and complain that they cannot find dalgona coffee online, and fulminate that life is so unfair that men ogle at them when they go out in mini-skirts… truly, how much some people suffer!

Oh, before I take your leave, readers: do look up Tanmoy’s blog and Shilpi’s blog. They have been writing very interesting things lately.

P.S., June 09: I am still trying to cheer you up a bit more. Consider: worldwide, including the most advanced countries, 400,000 have died so far, and in India, with nearly a fifth of world population, only 7,000. For God's sake, doesn't that mean that in this country we are almost immune? Also, a recent ICMR study says that in reality many tens of millions may have been infected already, but think sanely, that only means that a microscopic minority of us are dying of this disease; most of the infected are so unaffected that they never even know it happened to them. Take heart! If infected, at worst, most of you will suffer from nothing more than a running nose, a cough and a mild fever for a few days. Hasn't that happened to you a hundred times already? Did you die?

P.P.S., June 15: My ex student Swarnava has been feeling the same way: look up this blogpost.