For whom the Covid bell tolls
The Hindu pranama — shortened to pranam — which entails touching an older person’s feet is often cited to prove India’s reverence for age. That may be true, but the sentiment was somewhat more pragmatically demonstrated the other day when I telephoned a health clinic here in London to inquire about anti-covid-19 vaccinations. They asked my date of birth and promptly gave me an appointment within two days for the first of two jabs.
A third now seems likely with scientists suggesting that the Astrazeneca vaccine (which I took) is not effective enough against new virus strains. South Africa has already suspended mass Astrazeneca vaccinations. With talk of yet another injection being developed, and Joe Biden forbidding any mention of the “China virus”, it’s clear the peril is not country-specific but universal. It’s John Donne’s foreboding in reverse: No matter for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for you and me.
Old fogeys like me head Britain’s list of four priority groups for immunisation. Care home inmates come next, followed by frontline medical workers. The clinically vulnerable are fourth. The pecking order in most Asian countries would be government ministers, ruling party legislators, senior bureaucrats, and the rich, all with their respective families of course. Kinship being the strongest of Indian bonds, it was not surprising when a senior minister accused of promoting his son retorted, “If I don’t promote my son, whose son will I promote? Yours?”
That may not happen in Britain but, in normal years, Christmas sales in big stores replicate the mad scramble that ensued when several Indian states allowed alcohol shops to reopen after a 40-day lockdown. So free was the free-for-all that Mumbai ordered shutters-down after only two days. I wonder if anyone stopped to consider that such problems are inevitable when supplies are restricted and three times the US population is crammed into one-third the geographical area.
Politicians of all hues are terrified even to mention the challenge of numbers because nasbandi was blamed for Indira Gandhi’s downfall in 1977. Nor will any leader dare admit that orderly queueing is impossible in the rat race of Indian life where people are desperately anxious to overtake others. Everyone fears being left behind.
Personal space would have been a foreign concept even if Delhi’s Metro or Kolkata’s buses had not entitled tinned sardines to feel they wallowed in luxurious vacuum. Distance — that sure sign of stand-offishness — has subtle connotations amidst the shortages and scarcities of a caste-ridden, class-conscious, hierarchy whose leaders are bound for Ramrajya.
Their piety spurns both the expert advice of environmentalists and history’s grim warnings like Uttarakhand’s 2013 disaster when nearly 6,000 people were killed and 4,550 villages affected. Pious fanatics merrily cut down forests, blast mountains and send massive mounds of rock and soil hurtling down valleys to propitiate the gods with more than 500 miles of newly-built highway to the major Hindu temples. The loss of lives is a small price to pay for authority’s devotion.
The pandemic demands payment in other coins too. The French and Italians no longer kiss each other on the cheek. Americans nudge elbows instead of clasping hands. The English only stare. Smug Indians know that adab and namaste anticipated just such a crisis.
However, even 11 million coronavirus infections and more than 155,000 deaths seem low for a population of 1.3 billion, especially given the squalid congestion of bustees, jam-packed public transport, and teeming dormitories for migrant workers. The explanation probably lies in poor levels of testing rather than nationwide lockdowns which, despite aggressively lathi-wielding policemen, hardly succeed in enforcing social distancing.
But this is no time for blame games. Although the world has suffered pandemics since the Black Death killed 25 million people in 14th Century Europe, collective efforts at prevention and cure started in 1851 with the first International Sanitary Conference to counter cholera, plague, and yellow fever. It led in 1948 to the World Health Organisation whose executive board is chaired this year by India.
Given its size, numbers and established pharmaceutical industry, India could play a key role in curbing a disease that spreads so rapidly and insidiously that it will not be stopped until herd immunity extends across the globe. Sceptics argue that this means immunising 70 per cent or more of the population. Daunting though that sounds, it may be the only way.
Returning to Donne, no country — not even India — is an island entire of itself. Wealth distribution is grotesquely uneven but when it comes to suffering, it’s a borderless world. No nation can claim victory over coronavirus until the world as a whole has won.
Waiting for my second — or third — jab, I cannot forget that Britain generously allows us oldies a privileged start in the battle for survival.