JOIN USA new rage against the machine
Indians are trying their hardest to survive without oxygen, ICU beds, doctors, medicine, and vaccine. One expects no less of a proud world power that defeated Covid-19 in a speech at Davos—yet they seem upset and are generally being very negative about the whole thing.
I say Indians, and not India, because when the second wave of Covid-19 began to savage us, the State leapt nimbly offstage. For a few weeks, we were civilians in a deadly war, but without a government at the helm, each person for themselves, each family on its own. If it hadn’t been for the empathy, courage, and selflessness of friends and strangers who pulled together to fill the gaps—delivered oxygen cylinders, compiled lists of numbers and services, manned the phones, and physically showed up—many more of us would have negatively gone and died.
To be fair, the mighty government machine has done its best. Last year, it had said that we would defeat Covid-19 in 21 days, and advised us to roll about in cow dung, bang dinner plates, and light candles. In court, it fixed the migrant problem by saying that there were no migrants on the roads. This year, it said that the Ganga is too holy for coronavirus, and that political rallies are glorious—the best way to counter negativity, after all, is to super-spread positivity. It has recently said that dark chocolate helps, and also there’s this pretty cool herb. In court, it fixed the oxygen problem by saying, let’s not be a crybaby about oxygen.
Right? Remember? Be fair. Despite all the negativity around choking to death, the government has not rested for a minute in its efforts to rebuild Delhi’s central vista according to a design conceived by one Klingon with a god complex, for another. Behind the smokescreen sent up by funeral pyres, it works night and day to copy-paste self-congratulatory tweets, get ministers to write shrilly defensive op-eds, and promote troll-like articles put up on faux-international websites.
If you’re also going to insist on oxygen, look to your chief ministers—how much can one man do, even though the government’s whole schtick is that only that one man can do anything?
In Delhi, we lived this nightmare closely and for many weeks, but if we dominated much of the airtime, the Covid-ridden bodies washing up from the Covid-safe Ganga is just as loud. No citizen who has had a brush with death, or lost someone, or felt someone else’s pain and grief, or watched that guy speak up for the virus’s right to live, will forget what went down at this time. It really is life and death, and not just for Muslims—Beardy and Baldy were right: they do work for all Indians.
One of the casualties of this time has been language, which stands eviscerated. The situation has mutated to evade our usual descriptors. Agony, horror, tragedy, trauma, despair, wretchedness, apocalypse, terror, betrayal, grief, and fury don’t begin to describe it. We’re feeling a new level of rage against the machine.
As we crawl out of this government-made abyss, towards what is probably just a staging area for a coming third wave, I’d like to offer one neologism. The word is ‘paeandemic’. It’s a noun that describes a disease of mass sycophancy, either blind or fearful or both, that obliterates truth, reality, integrity, and autonomy, at hideous cost—ultimately, at the cost of life. The pandemic is taking its toll, but the paeandemic is turning India to ashes. It’s a disease we’ve suffered for seven years, and its only cure is to break the chain of transmission.
Now that would be positively healing.