The Summer of Corona 2: The Days of Pandemic and Pandemonium

A recollection during the lockdown.

As things stand today, the shutters are still down except for the erratic reports of burglars stealing bottles from bars and stores and police nabbing unscrupulous enterprisers selling all kinds of drinks at 10–15 times the MRP. (Image: Yaroslav Danylchenko/Pexels)

It’s been more than a month and everything we hear every day incessantly is only about the coronavirus disease. Never have we seen such a demanding virus in life. For many of us we are waiting for the Indian central government to lift the lockdown as declared on 4 May, but nobody knows for sure if the condition would improve by then.

Meanwhile, so many terms have slipped into our daily conversation: Lockdown, quarantine, Covidiot, doomscrolling, Zoombombing, novel coronavirus, physical distancing, self-isolation, face masks, ventilators, PPE, flatten the curve. And only one thing is for certain now. The pandemic is going to have a deep impact on our lifestyles, economies and social mores.

A few industries including aviation, hospitality and electronics are going to be hit badly, experts have speculated, while they say others in retail and entertainment would do just fine. The International Monetary Fund, which predicts the present crisis will affect 170 countries, had called it ‘the worst downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s’.

Whatever the dreaded virus is going to demand more from human beings in the coming weeks and months it seems daily wage earners have not had enough issues with life and living—and the list of distressing issues goes on as long as the number of both infected people and casualties has been rising constantly across the world. People say the virus sees neither region nor religion but apparently it is too discriminatory towards the underprivileged.

(As of 1 Aug 2021, there have been 199,022,838 Coronavirus Cases, 4,240,374 Deaths and 179,631,883 Recovered. Source: Worldometer)

Uncertain Times

For the first time, globalists have a concrete example, other than the intangible climate change, to illustrate how national governments are grossly incompetent when it comes to human beings fighting against a common worldwide enemy. Quite ironic that it has arrived in the form of an invisible and irremediable disease-causing organism.

It’s been more than a month in this part of the world but the news had broken out much earlier—it goes back to China in December but it was on 10 March when the World Health Organisation labelled it as a pandemic. That was also the same time when the virus literally hit home. I was in my hometown in Imphal with the Yaoshang festive air still lingering on, yet it never occurred that these things will come to pass like how it is now, though all the events on the last couple of days of the festival were cancelled in the town. Very briefly, the shit got real. Everything coronavirus was then a meme and news reports about the wet markets in Wuhan, and things escalated quickly. Of course, the river of memes will continue flowing as it evolves in this case from those of hand sanitizers and Corona beer to quarantine and video calls, but unless something happens to us directly, we have a feeling that it will not affect us.

Check this stat: on 15 March when I was leaving my hometown with ignorance such is bliss there were 26 cases of infection. Then after a public curfew on 22 March, India declared the first lockdown on 25 March for 21 days. While one thing we long for in life is certainty, the situation today is an anti-thesis and most of the time it is all speculation. The uncertainty, besides how things are going to be, is also obvious in how the number has been rising from zero to what we have been witnessing everywhere and the symptom of the disease ranges from asymptomatic to death! 

The case of uncertainty is cruder in other mortal instances. One week into the lockdown, there were reports of tipplers committing suicide in a couple of states in South India so there were high hopes of liquor stores opening for limited hours just like the government had arranged for other essential commodities. It did not happen but when the first phase ended on 14 April, people hoped that those might change on 15 April but the previous day, India announced lockdown 2.0 for another 20 days.

Yet the spirits were never dampened and there was still a speculation that the stores would open from 20 April as the government had planned from that day onwards for an exit strategy, which is a term for relaxing the pan-India lockdown norms for certain sectors to give some life to the failing economy. And as things stand today, the shutters are still down except for the erratic reports of burglars stealing bottles from bars and stores and police nabbing unscrupulous enterprisers selling all kinds of drinks at 10–15 times the MRP. The spirit, it’s no more predictable but people are looking forward to the 4th, not only for drinks of course.

 

The Show Must Go On

However, life goes on, no matter how much tedious it has become under lockdown. Celebrities are sharing their useless workout videos and so are their annoying fans; Donald Trump said a few days ago that people should be injected with disinfectants to get rid of COVID-19; just a day before the first lockdown, I went to a bank wearing a cap and a mask and the bank teller did not suspect anything; in many places it has become a sort of adventure to go out of one’s home to get supplies and groceries; introverts are checking on their extrovert friends to see if the latter is okay; and the governments are busy on what needs to be done to stop coronavirus.

And as it happens any time of the year or place in mainland India, many people from the Northeast have been facing racial abuses in these difficult days. But I’ll not play the victim card here because I’m fed up with my own people when it comes to racial issues in the mainland. One of the first things is their desperation for acceptance and then the cry, admitting or rather whining that they are also Indians. We live in a third world country and the issue is not going to cease, say, if the present nation-state remains as it is for another 200 years and even becomes a highly developed industrial state. Look at the US for example.

There is no space to elaborate on racism today but the least we can do is to have some self-dignity. People are just tools of the establishment and it is important that we emphasize rather on the power structure than on the self-styled superior people.

Paradoxical as it may sound but leaders create stupid people. You know what kind of superior people they are and we have so many of them. In the mainland, one reason why the media has been nosediving into an irreligious pit can be attributed to one factor: the rule of the right-wing government.

While people across the globe are facing a moment of reckoning from the pandemic, the media in India—with much thanks to the establishment—has hit a new low.

Today it is unimaginable for anything that has not been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. Still, many people are hell-bent on arguing about whose gods— the Hindus or the Muslims’ to be precise—have the bigger dicks. While the anti-CAA protest was put off in the epicentre Delhi just because of the lockdown but with the problem yet to be solved, the media has been rearing its ugly head with a lot of support from mainstream television journalists and many of them cannot tell the difference between a country and cowdung.

On one hand, these television journalists in mainland India are leaving no stone unturned to vilify the Muslims and blaming them for citizenship, first and now on coronavirus on the most frivolous grounds. India cannot simply wash its hand of this. 

On the other, there are the FIRs against Masrat Zahra, Peerzada Ashiq and Gowhar Geelani last week in Kashmir and the arrest of Prashant Kanojia in Uttar Pradesh. These will never help India in securing a better rank than occupying 142 in the World Free Press Index of the Reporters Without Borders.  

‘The almost simultaneous opening of three investigations reflects a deliberate desire by the Indian police to not just harass the three journalists targeted by the complaints but also to thereby intimidate all reporters trying to work freely in Kashmir,’ said Daniel Bastard, the head of RSF’s Asia-Pacific desk. ‘We call for the immediate withdrawal of these complaints, which have no credible legal basis. Branding any dissenting journalist or embarrassing photo as “terrorism” speaks volumes about the contempt for journalistic pluralism displayed by the Indian authorities.’

In March, RSF reported a surge in recent months of cases of harassment of media personnel and violations of the confidentiality of their sources in the Kashmir Valley, and cited nearly 15 examples. (Source: Indian police campaign of harassment of journalists in Kashmir)

The Other Side

In a hinterland like Manipur, we can see the macrocosm of the pandemic in a clearer way. After a spree of detaining people finding fault with the government on social media, N Biren and Co has been putting effort to contain the issue, fortunately, much to the satisfaction of the public. In one of the governmental talks between the heads of the states and the prime minister, the Manipur chief minister also brought up the issue of racism, which he later said it was inevitable.

Over the weeks the issues must have been a literal headache to those people in power. With apprehension about the pandemic in the initial days, the government has seen the forced resignation of the treacherous minister Thounaojam Shyamkumar who was previously restrained from entering the state legislative assembly by the Supreme Court, a healthcare system that can be easily overwhelmed, then the rice crisis, smuggling of tobacco products, arrangement for online classes for schools and colleges and more significantly, the question over the lives of students on how their education could be sustained plus the matters relating to school/college fees, the payment of salary and the government’s plan to bring back Manipuris stranded in different part of India and so on.

This would sound nonsensical but many people at the lower hierarchy are relatively better placed because, as the numbers show, everyone is affected and what many of us have to do is to merely wait and watch. This is best seen in a meme that illustrates one could save the world by staying at home. Or to quote Blaise Pascal, ‘All of humanity's problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.’

Coming back, there are multiple issues but the state government does not have to worry about a vaccine, and it can stay put just by being defensive—just as opening the college, where I work at and which has been shut down since March 15, is above my pay grade. Besides there was the case of two infected people in the state but both of them have already recovered making the state a ‘green’ zone.

Now the novel coronavirus has reminded us that death is atrocious and untimely death downright awful. In life or death, however, it will make a lot of difference for everyone if we can stick to our principles. As Th Shyamkumar had shown it proficiently, many Manipuris prefer to sit on the fence, complaining about racism and fighting for liberation and whining about acceptance, all simultaneously. This is, I feel, more dangerous than the static routine that the lockdown has imposed on us.

In these days of uncertainty, what have broken the routine are the news about the states and Central governments’ graded plans to exit the lockdown, a few companies laying off people and the former’s complain about ‘lost’ revenues, the University Grants Commission—as on 29 April—coming up with a schedule for this and the next semesters, the constant reminder that whisky and rum are no essential commodity, the daily rise of 1500-2000 new Covid-19 infections in India, my sense of belonging nowhere and the rumour about the death of North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

Finishing Lines

The vanity of modern life has made many of us cocksure about us controlling the world but that is definitely not the case as the coronavirus has shown us—and neither science is not synonymous to redemption. From the edge of the solar system we are just a speck of dust, which begets if this is all a fight between two seemingly incompatible microbes on a flying rock and yes, there will be a victor. However, the idiocy and impatience are visible in a few Western countries where some people are staging anti-lockdown protests.

Previously humans have had many of this kind of disease with the 1918 Spanish Flu being cited as one prime example. One of the precautions is the elaborate social control measures and Modi had claimed that the lockdown across India has been instrumental in controlling the number of cases as compared to other countries. China was also under scrutiny of the global media for its Mao-style social control earlier this year. Experts are also suggesting that these measures, along with medications and further a vaccine will only help solve the problem. But till then, certain or not, we have to keep up with the coronavirus.  

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Read all the posts in: The Summer of Corona