Oh well, December 7, 2021. Blank. Empty. Clueless. Blank again. Now what?
I technically shouldn't feel so clueless. The news made me swing between amusement and angst today. Mainly angst. Remember those classes in school when your mind would drift, so you'd keep track of tally marks for the number of times a teacher mentioned a certain word or reaffirmed a certain quirk? This is one of those days for me.
Counted the number of times one paper mentioned Omicron. 15 across two different pages. I refuse to look for more. Omicron is the cause of the recent blood bath among stocks. Omicron is why schools are going to remain shut for longer (The only thing that delights me about my age is the fact that I am not in school during a pandemic. I really feel for all kids across the world.) Omicron is why we have no idea where in the world we can go without quarantining or getting stuck. Omicron is why we're talking about the nth wave (I've lost track of which wave we're supposed to be on globally), community spread, and vaccine efficacy and booster doses and thinking about going back to live under the rock of stress and paranoia. Let's hope we all get out of this unscathed this time round. Turns out, in the quest for showing how well vaccination drives are going, the once glorious and illustrious state of Bihar has listed Narendra Modi, Amit Shah, Amitabh Bachchan, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan etc. on their vaccination records. Oh my. First, did this warrant front page headlines? Second, what if, like doppelgangers, these namesakes actually exist in Bihar? The former is tougher to answer. As for the latter, it's Bihar. Enough said. No doubts about the veracity of their records. The influence extends to Tam land too, apparently. Did you know? They dragged in an old and departed person’s phone number in Tamil Nadu to account for two individuals, both alive and kicking, who got their first vaccine jabs.
Before I reveal the next thought, I wonder if I should check up laws for sedition, freedom of speech and expression, public expression of uninformed thought, etc. In my opinion, the South African national, India’s Omicron patient no. 1 (he has been named now, and a case has been filed against him) who fled India, exhibited wonderful presence of mind in just going away, to wherever he went. On a different tangent altogether, that seems to be most Indians who end up going abroad to study/work and not coming back. So many articles about the brain drain since Parag Agrawal become Twitter CEO! Well, good for him. Do you blame them though? I remember watching this John Oliver episode in which they talk about a school textbook teaching kids how different races were born, based on the level of baked-ness of bread. There are other reports that say that school kids actually believe that aeroplanes existed in India during the times of the Hindu god, Rama. We learn history in school apparently. Like the Roman legionaries say in Asterix and Obelix, “Join the army, they said. See the world, they said,” after being bashed up by the endearing Gauls. “Join school, they said. You’ll learn a lot, they said.” Sure, but they didn’t say what you’d learn, did they?
Coming to reasoning and scientific statements, which Indian will ever forget the grand speech made before the 21-day lockdown from March 24, 2020 to deal with the then novel coronavirus? The Mahabharata was fought and won in 18 days, and we will, likewise, as a nation, claim victory over covid in 21 days (paraphrased, but rough gist of what the Covid Vishwa Mahaguru said). In a not-so-recent video, stand-up comic and writer, Varun Grover beautifully describes how stunned he was when he heard Modi proclaim that India and Canada form the 2ab in the formula for square of the binomial, (a+b)2= a2 + b2 + 2ab. I’d be stunned speechless too. That is some math I never learnt at school. (Expressing personal opinion in India is now a touchy subject. Being a general chicken in the scheme of things, I am now attributing anything even related to whatever anyone has said about certain persons. By the way, another show of Munawar Faruqui’s got cancelled. In Gurgaon, this time.)
In a country that 1.3 billion of us call home, there is a lot of suffering today. Innocent civilians and miners are dead in Nagaland. The applicability and scope of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act are, not surprisingly, being criticised again. Caste and gender violence was reported in Uttar Pradesh, again. A right-wing mob in Madhya Pradesh attacked a school protesting alleged conversion. A school. The rates of malnutrition among children is alarming. Farmers protested for an entire year in India, with 700 reported deaths. The Citizenship Amendment Act led to furore, protests, and riots, across the country. J&K and the North East have been in pain for a long time now. So have many minorities, marginalised communities, and those whom we don’t even get to hear about. Why is it that the innocent and vulnerable always end up paying the price?
And there’s one lot of us who chooses to read and watch what they want to, who lives in a world that they choose to live in, who believes what they wish to believe. And here’s me, in my own bubble, writing whatever it is that I feel like writing. Comfortably numb to the world around. Cynical and pessimistic. It is what it is today.
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