Pandemic and WW3 of Our Time
If some of us watched the inauguration of the USA's now President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in tears, it was not just because finally, large swathes of the world were represented on that stage in the form of Kamala Harris. The longed-for reprieved was here.
It was also the spectre of eerily empty streets, skeletal trees, under a gloomy winter sky, the thousands of American flags meant to represent humans but reminded us instead of the 410,000 Americans dead from the Coronavirus (the casualties surpassing that of American troops in WW2) under the leadership of the former President who appeared to care more about the economy than saving his people.
When a young, poised poet Amanda Gorman took a deep breath at the mike, and the camera panned to thousands of armed forces, instead of happy spectators, I remembered a bright snowy winters day, my brother and I waiting outside our school gates for the army truck in Shimla to take us home.
We laughed helplessly at a comic strip in the "Illustrated Weekly of India" that showed a General giving two orders. The first-, "Charge all you like.", to his battalion. The second, to his wife – "Wear a bikini, you'll look cute." The telegrams were naturally switched, the wife went wild with his credit card, and the soldiers scowled in bikinis.
War was nothing alarming to us given that our father had fought in two wars against India and one against China. We laughed but knew the Indo Pak partition that started with a scuffle in Kashmir with Pakistani Pashtuns, eventually left a million Muslim and Hindus dead in 1947 was no joke.
It is a reminder of the nature of war. How it begins with human desires, small degradations, or the narcissistic pride of leaders who forget they are only human.
The murder of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria somewhere in modern Yugoslavia led to World War 1 which led to Europe's big recession Hitler's regime and World War 11.
It may have merely taken former President Barak Obama sleekly roasting the boorish Donald Trump at a 2011 Correspondents dinner, to fatally goading Trump to run for President.
The carnage left by Donald Trump's Presidency was, as we know, no joke, conjuring images of a World War: guns trained at school-children in the absence of gun control laws; George Floyd being choked to death by a policeman in the broad light of day for being black; a wall proclaiming racism. In the last days of Triumphs Presidency' war' culminated in his tacit assent and goading as supporters (white supremacists amongst them) stormed the Capitol building.
WW3 is a headlong collision of a deadly pandemic (that emerged either from a Chinese market (because humans there decided that bats must be plucked from their natural habitat and consumed,) or a Chinese lab. Eastern hubris met Western Hubris leaving some 700,000 dead in Europe and the 400,000 dead in the US. We haven't learned yet that pride is fatal.
A small meal, a little handshake and war, has left some 2.1 million people dead and is now multiplying with mutation upon mutation as if at war.
And us, small new world islands battered by colonialism, used to hurricanes, patronised, referred to as Second, and the Third world by the 'First', are doing better with skills of survivors embodied by wise leadership: closed borders, closed schools, low cases, low deaths, and no dithering.
Now that the UK variant is here, reportedly faster spreading and more virulent than the original Coronavirus, there is yet another battle amidst the war. Ourselves. Various studies in hospitals show that the risk of non-white populations such as ours, (Black, Asian, Hispanic) dying was 50 per cent greater than whites; that we die younger; that over 50 % of our kind refusing the jab in Europe. As the vaccine is imminent, we must not give in to this death wish. To vaccinate is to live.
There is a war on globally. In our islands, war is reduced to many small battles, within each of us. Whether or not we will win, it will depend, to paraphrase the awe-inspiring young poet Amanda Gorman "there is always light if we're brave enough to see it, to be it."