Philosophically, perhaps, humanity has never before in modern history been closer than during this time of distancing. Even if it be in sheer doubt and incomprehension rather than any kind of clarity or consensus. The world is slowly recalibrating itself to a new order, dictated by a virus, that is, an amorphous something that exists in the grey area between living and non-living. That too, a ‘novel’ virus—hitherto unknown, except perhaps in secretive labs and among the community of bats—that’s attacking the very microcosm of our being, the human cell.
We are not adjusting merely to a new value system where one has to quite literally measure the distance between two fellow human beings, we are adjusting to life as a new kind of idea, a passage that will now be imbued with more scepticism, a life that has to be lived with tangible uncertainties. All our modern icons of motion—ships, aeroplanes, metros—are frozen into immobility along with our financial plans. Our highways stretch out as empty as our national (and personal) budgets. Only what was better left on the inside of a bat or a biological laboratory of batty scientists has gained lightning mobility. Only questions appear in a crowd now.
If the world’s events could be read as a book, what we have been reading is a massive mash-up of genres: with apocalyptic fiction colouring everything, from psychology to self-help. The NYT’s reports on COVID could have passed off as a crime thriller in other times: how the virus landed in the south of Seattle and in Chicago, and how another strain travelled to Los Angeles. The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center has been identifying the trail of coronavirus, through RNA sequencing. If only highway patrol or airport security could block its passage!
Of course, the social, political and emotional consequences of its arrival are different at each point, if equally and deeply unsettling. Someone’s nephew working in Seattle may be at the receiving end of not just the virus but also new immigration rules. Another person may be adjusting to a keener sense of alienation: a world where the virus has not just been infecting human bodies, but has already infected every aspect of life, including our vocabulary, and finding the distance between Ohio and an Indian city insurmountable, able only to hear his ailing old mother’s heart-wrenching cries over Zoom. And the edges of that city would be lit up briefly by the wails of other mothers, poor Indians on the go, corteges of the living dead.
The middle-class stories are touched by a new insecurity, a new vulnerability to trauma in a world they thought they had under control, with their gated communities and insurance policies. None of their debates over the right kind of policy (or the right kind of mask) would save the life of a 12-year-old tribal girl who covered all the social distance between her workplace in Telangana and her village in Chhattisgarh. By the Olympic standards of India’s poor, 150 km wasn’t much, you’d say—but just 10 km short of home, she dropped dead, dehydrated and hungry. The chillis she had gone to pluck in the neighbouring state will probably rot too, or be thrown on the roadside, with no takers or transport.
There are thousands like her, traversing the highways of hunger because their sources of sustenance have dried up due to the lockdown. While they try, desperately, to reach the imagined safety of their home and hearth, most of them would be oblivious of the slanging match between our main opposition party and the central rulers. Its very terms of reference would sound bizarre. Should the mountains of rice rotting in state godowns be used to make sanitisers or given out as free ration? Both are essential items in this day and age, though there’s also talk of making ethanol out of them—and the ethics of ethanol are fuzzy.
Anyway, India is that strange country that scores equally high on hunger and in foodgrain reserves—there was 309.76 mt rice, 275.21 mt of wheat and 287.08 mt of unmilled paddy in the central pool as of March. That’s not counting the bumper crop waiting to be procured. Well, all we can say to make sense of this is that we are at war, perhaps in a place worse than anytime post-WWII. Are the reserves being kept for something worse to come? While the WHO tried ineffectually to extricate itself from the crossfire between Donald Trump’s US and Xi Jinping’s China, the UN has predicted that the world is on the brink of starvation. By the end of 2020, it says, an astounding 135 million people will be starving in addition to the 821 million who already go to bed with an empty stomach.
How do you read a world that’s at once so full of gloom and where, paradoxically, nature seems to have found a brief niche? Where the Cauvery, at long last, flows crystal clear? Perhaps the human species is by itself the original sin, and must atone. If only they did not pick out the most vulnerable among the species to pay the bill. In a world that’s allegedly full of new uncertainties, that would be depressingly predictable. And it would be a far greater sin if we allow that to happen.
Santwana Bhattacharya
Resident Editor,Karnataka
(Email address: santwana@newindianexpress.com)