19
WHAT was the highest bounty put on anyone in the Wild West? Whatever it was, it was not in trillions of dollars as has been put on the head of an invisible foe that has struck terror across the world. Viruses existed before Homo sapiens walked the earth. Ceaseless more could be released from the planet’s womb as polar ice melts into the ocean.
The ice is said to have entombed a bizarre range of viruses during cataclysmic intermissions in the earth’s endless journey. Likelier still that viruses were around before man invented money, when people healed each other with gentle care, rooted in observation and experience of the local resources. That’s how medicine evolved and advanced, cashlessly.
Occasionally, temporal knowledge blended with spiritual faith. Ancient texts speak of great souls who discovered miraculous cures for illnesses trickier than the coronavirus. Jesus healed men and women of all manner of afflictions, selflessly. The legendary Graham Staines was his 20th-century fan, treating lepers in remote Indian villages in a one-way relationship, of giving. The missionary from Australia and Karachi’s Abdul Sattar Edhi were kindred spirits who worked for the poor in concert though they may have never met.
I once watched the late Princess Diana closely during a trip to Nepal where with bare hands she caressed the oozing foot (or what remained of the foot) of an inmate at a leprosy hospital outside Kathmandu. She was a devotee of Mother Teresa, she told me, and planned to visit her in Kolkata, but life had other plans as John Lennon always believed. Staines’ singular human motive was to seek spiritual grace and many in Nepal that day didn’t see Diana any differently.
One wonders if the invisible tyrant is watching with malice or humour or bewilderment.
In another tradition, Hanuman flew faster than a modern jet to fetch the life-saving herb that healed Lakshman of a grievous battle wound. There was no transaction except love, something one doesn’t hear of in Prime Minister Modi’s speeches.
Similar legends abound of heroes who tended to the weak with their powerful gift of healing. Therefore, when Donald Trump sits in the White House, counting sinful volumes of money and prescribing intravenous cleansing fluids to boot, to prevent the coronavirus from spreading, one wonders if the invisible tyrant is watching with malice or humour or bewilderment.
Imagine that the tiny creature is not as bereft of emotion as science posits, and that it is capable of summoning a laugh. Cut millions of dollars to World Health Organisation, commands Trump like a Lewis Carroll character in fitful rage. Release billions to save American lives, only those with legitimate visas and money to pay, he might have added. So step into the shoes of the invisible tyrant haunting powerful countries, laying waste their economies and murdering their citizens by depriving them of oxygen. Seven million are killed every year by denial of oxygen. The world hasn’t demurred, the virus would be wondering.
Millions die of breathing polluted air, says a UN study. But do watch the theatre of the absurd on display. The barren stage you’d observe has a massive pile of cash centre stage. It’s the only prop in view, with people milling around it, choking, gasping for breath, taking bits from the heap and flinging it skywards for a cure.
Move the gaze also to a piece in The New York Times. It speaks of a Soviet era assault by bubonic plague in the 1920s. The Bolshevik revolution was still young amid the din of Europe’s war drums. The system that was set up by a new nation of teeming workers had created an amazing network of professionals with such durable laboratories that they have helped Vladimir Putin’s Russia to be a step ahead of the viral outbreak. “At most,” says the grudging report, “the legacy (of the) Soviet system helped delay the spread, and it is just one data point in assessing why the coronavirus moved more slowly in Russia, Ukraine and other former Soviet countries than in Western Europe and the United States.”
Trillions of US dollars seemed a far cry, and wasteful in USSR. It’s just an alternative way of thinking, of healing sans the cash nexus, minus the profit motive. That humanism permeated the Cuban doctors sent to hotspots across a troubled world by a tiny generous country under American siege.
Another quaint human feature the invisible bandit would have picked out. The women, it would notice, have done much better than men in leading the battle against the outbreak. The Guardian newspaper offered an impressive list of women leaders under whose watch the fight has been more evenly controlled and less damaging for the society they serve. They include, of course, the prime minister of New Zealand and the German chancellor. You would have noted the curious omission of K.K. Shailaja Teacher, Kerala’s health minister. When Prime Minister Modi’s followers were promoting cow dung as a cure against the coronavirus, Shailaja was fighting her battle on two fronts, with widespread blind faith on the one hand, and the virus on the other.
“Fighting an epidemic like corona requires scientific temper, humanism and a spirit for inquiry and reform. Superstition, credulity, emotionalism and irrationalism will derail the whole process by dispiriting and discouraging the experts and health activists who try hard to resolve the threat scientifically,” said Shailaja to Huffington Post. “In Kerala, we have initiated stringent police action against those who attempted to spread stupidity in the face of virus scare.”
What else would be intriguing the virus? If its purpose was to harm the world we live in, we have better options. The British prime minister was in the ICU, and the question being asked was: who controls the nuclear trigger? Israel, meanwhile, has been raiding Syria. Saudi Arabia continues to bombard Yemen. American warships are encircling Venezuela, while India and Pakistan have been lobbing mortar shells at each other. Who needs COVID-19?
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, April 28th, 2020
