Friday Morning Round Up: Present and Future Tense

Prabhat Patnaik in The Telegraph

Modi’s penchant for ‘effect’: A very distinguished virologist whom I happen to know believes that the lockdown in India was an overreaction. His argument is that since the coronavirus was coming to India from outside, testing and quarantining people coming from abroad, and those with whom they might have been in contact within the country, should have been quite sufficient to prevent its spread. To lockdown a whole country, instead of isolating such enclaves, was like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

Christoffe Jaffrelot in The Indian Express

Rural India left in the lurch: The COVID-19 crisis is affecting rural India at a time when agriculture is already in a precarious situation. The thousands of migrant workers who have returned to their villages since the lockdown used to send home large remittances. Tariq Thachil’s field work shows that a majority of the migrant workers send 25 to 50 per cent of their monthly income to their families — which will now miss this money. In Bihar, these remittances accounted for 35.6 per cent of gross state domestic product in 2011-12, up from 11.6 per cent in 2004-05. How will the villagers of Bihar, or Orissa, for that matter, cope with this new situation?

Ian Inkster in South China Morning Post

Culture & society can save lives: Despite the conflicts between, say, the governments of China, Japan and Taiwan, and their vast political differences, their basically successful responses to Covid-19 have been strikingly similar.

What has come through in each of the East Asian societies is a moral economy compounded of ancient traditions of Confucianism and Buddhism, and moderation of individualism by deep values of benevolence, shared responsibilities and obligations that might well be at the heart of East Asia’s success.

Cultures that are sturdy in a world of change do not have to rely on expensive policies or promises of rapid economic recovery, for cultural suasion can go a very long way. It can save lives.

Jug Suraiya in Times of India

The Present Is All We Have: When we anticipate a happiness, or a hardship to come, today’s joys and sorrows fleet by us, as insubstantial as a dream being dreamt by another. Then, like a camera coming into sudden focus so that a hazy picture jumps into sharp clarity, the coronavirus effect thrust the present on us in all its bristling immediacy.

No more envisioning things and events a week, a month, a year to come. Part of it, of course, was the lockdown, which squeezed time and space into the cramped claustrophobia of curfew. But even after the lockdown ends, the uncharted and unchartable course of the pandemic has scattered all our carefully-made plans to the random winds of chance.

The virus has given us a gift, the gift of the present. Whether it’s a welcome or unwelcome gift is up to us. But the present, tense as it may be, is all we have. Or ever had.