India cannot breathe while Indians must depend on the kindness of strangers

How does one cope?

You spend even a minute on social media. Reading the news. Checking messages. Talking to people.

And there’s only one topic of conversation: India’s massive Covid19 emergency.

People begging for medicines, for oxygen, for hospital beds. People trying to cremate or bury their loved ones. Loved ones who have died from Covid19. Loved ones who have got Covid.

You want to escape. You can’t because there’s nowhere to go.

A few of us are the saviours here. People who go above and beyond themselves to help others. To provide practical help, succour, food, access to medical facilities, money. Others try and marshal lists of saviours.

But for most of us, it’s a battle between keeping your loved ones safe, keeping safe yourself and trying to manage whatever life throws at you the best you can.

This time, it’s not like last year. Last year, we didn’t really know what we were in for. We could mix hope into the fear. This time, it’s hard to find hope. There’s just dread.

The dread is amplified because we were told by Our Big Man in charge in February, that India had vanquished the virus. And we were also told that we have to be self-reliant (“atmanirbhar”) in this crisis. Are these mixed messages or clues for what to expect in the future?

As it turns out, self-reliant is what we have become. We cannot fully rely on governments, whether Centre or states. As of now, state governments have no one to rely on either, except themselves. Sometimes, maybe, each other. But having been told that self-reliance is the new way forward, states and people stumble along.

We wait outside hospitals, oxygen cylinder next to us, and hope someone will let us in. We tweet to our dying breath on Twitter and hope someone will save us. We scramble and horrifically, sometimes we fail.

The numbers are huge. The suffering is immense. The losses are unimaginable.

In that other world, the one we thought was normal, there would be something to rely on, something beyond simply human help and human compassion. There are systems. Plans. Strategies. Contingencies.

There are plans and contingencies made specifically for largescale calamities. Sometimes, we stand in line to elect persons who would spare us from a helpless desperate system of self-reliance when you have no access.

Some people might remember the idea of a national government. A government at the Centre that applies standards and processes for the whole nation. Which includes all state governments in this system because in that other world, all people who live in this country are entitled to the same help.

A central government which does not discriminate between states based on its voting patterns promising free vaccines to some and not to others, or on demographics or on party politics. Especially when we are in the grip of a severe national calamity of stupendous proportions.

Where is that normal world?

We could have had it. We could have demanded it. But we were busy. Hating each other. Blaming the past. Hero-worshipping. Believing what we knew were outright lies. Now at breaking point, what do we have?

In our world, the Big Man in charge has endless excuses, some of his own, some provided by his fanbase. After all, we had been told to be careful, to be self-reliant, not to go out if we didn’t have to. We were careless, we didn’t listen. Obviously, catastrophe fell upon us. How dare we now blame the Big Man? Don’t you know he works 18 hours a day?

No one mentions how the Big Man and his government issued advisories to the states to open up. To restart schools and colleges. To organise massive religious functions. And even as numbers of the infected rose, the Big Man advised the states not to go into a lockdown state. His cohorts assured as that all was well. And the electioneering continued. Even as we ran out of necessary vaccinations.

As India runs out of breath, the Big Man at the Centre carries on with his election strategy to take over the country at any cost. I’m not going to be overdramatic and state that he and his cohorts climb over dead bodies. But there were dead bodies being burnt and buried in horrifically large numbers even as election speeches were being made.

So, gather yourselves. Rely on each other and on the kindness of strangers. In this world, this is what we have. We made it.