The most horrific couple of years in living memory have passed. With the wisdom of hindsight, we try to figure out how exactly we fared in this unequal battle against nature. Weighing the lessons, losses and takeaways we are confronted with some interesting realizations.
The first months of the lockdown will haunt us perhaps for the rest of our lives. In India, it was imposed without notice leaving literally millions in the lurch. The most heart-wrenching stories are of the migrant workers. Starved, stranded, deserted and miles from home, some took to the road- women and children in tow. Some were crushed under the wheels of a train, some perished on the way and some sprayed with bleaching powder near their state borders. The political acrimony saw unheard of vituperation, with some leaders refusing to allow “migrant expresses” from entering their state borders. Against daunting odds, a few individuals stood out, as glorious exceptions. They helped thousands survive. To add insult to injury, social media was flooded with facetious posts, jokes, memes or politically loaded diatribe. We all were complicit in this infliction of pain wreaked out on the most vulnerable sections of our society either through passivity but majorly by our indifference and occasionally by a sneering disdain for petty matters. Apart from these heaps of garbage on social media, progeny will possibly find no other means to decide how we fared when the stiffest challenge had come calling at our door.
A collision played out between self-centeredness and social responsibility. Individual acts of sacrifice by a few doctors, health care workers and ordinary people, inter alia- shone bright, but on the whole, it can be safely stated that we did not come out with flying colours by any stretch of imagination. Given the potency of communicability of the disease, isolating patients was absolutely justified, but can human sensitivity be reconciled to ostracization of families of the sick, the dead or to spraying of sanitizers on other humans? To what extent does the need for self-preservation exonerate such depravity?
Our collective complacence and irresponsibility virtually courted the second and most lethal wave of the pandemic. Despite repeated caution from experts, the authorities and the people simultaneously lowered their guard, once there was a lull after the first wave. Political and religious gatherings, easing of travel restrictions, irregular use of masks and sanitizers, untrammelled carousing by tourists and revellers all contributed to a spurt in the case count. The deadlier variant combined with higher numbers wreaked havoc. The harsh reality emerging from this was the apathy of political parties to compromise on election dates or their campaigns. Some religious gatherings also quickly took a political turn.
The much-awaited vaccines finally arrived and so did the great Indian turnaround. Those who were sceptical of the practicality of inoculating such a vast, diverse and underprivileged population, especially in the rural areas, thankfully found their misgivings unfounded. If we had failed ourselves in the first year, we redeemed much of it during this massive drive. Beginning with the most vulnerable sections, we managed to cover almost the entire eligible population of close to 1500 million. An achievement that would have made even the most developed countries proud. India, true to its tradition of upholding human values, looked beyond its borders and supplied huge quantities of vaccines to countries in dire need of them. Had it not been for this wonderfully organized and synchronized effort the casualties could have been significantly greater.
That there are two sides to a coin is an old adage, and there are very few truer than it. The pandemic revealed the innate weaknesses in our public health infrastructure. Massive shortage of oxygen in the national capital itself, insufficiency of hospital beds, and susceptible urban clusters acting as virtual cesspools of virus- breeding. However, the insanitary conditions we are exposed to in the normal course turned out to be a blessing in disguise under the circumstances. Our innate immunity proved much higher than that of the less populated, clean and wealthy nations of the world.
The long haul against the disease, saw multiple lockdowns, impacting all aspects of society, especially the economy. There were many ups and downs, criticisms and political hubris, salvages and failures, but eventually the country survived on its own. Acknowledgement of the problems, transparency and good surveillance saw us through. We carefully avoided the Chinese style policy of creating an artificial bubble, securing very early approval from a dubious World Health Organization for its indigenous vaccine and declaring an early victory over Covid, while the rest of the world was in the grips of its ravage. The fact that the latter has back-fired miserably, has further enhanced India’s rating in crisis management, as these are two of the most populous countries at almost comparable stages of development. The moral is that democracies are better equipped to deal with such situations compared to oligarchies and autocracies.
On the whole, it was a mixed affair. If it was not an unequivocal success, it was not a complete failure either. We could have done better, but only perhaps, given the intimidating constraints existent. Years of deprivation have taught us to be moderate, have buttressed some of our innate faculties, and above all kept us humane.
It was a social media post by a former class mate from school which in a way moulded my perspective of the understanding deficit or gap that exists between the developed nations and our Third world. He was a brilliant student and is now a successful first-generation American citizen. It was election tine in America and in his post, he was arguing in favour of one of the contestants who held that the disease would kill mostly the aged and the ailing, who anyway are leading the last few residual years of their “quality adjusted” lives with a huge drag on the public exchequer. Even more mortifyingly, he broke the numbers down and denominated each such dispensable life to the amount of dollars saved and thus vicariously earned.
We had started out together as kids sharing benches in primary school, till the difference in our abilities took us to different worlds. He scaled enviable heights in terms of material success. Our worlds would not have converged to a common issue had it not been for a levelling pandemic. In a moment of epiphany, I realized that while we search for the throbbing of life in the squalor of Kolkata, my friend factors death in complex mathematical models to fathom its impact on wealth creation. Contrary to what I always thought, those two kids simply grew up to be different. Neither fared better or worse than the other.