On a clear April day in the summer of 2020, the peaks of the Dhauladhar mountains in Himachal Pradesh were visible from distant Jalandhar as the lockdown imposed on March 25 sent pollution levels plummeting, leaving the skies clear. Sadly, it would be the only bright spot for the next two years as the worst pandemic to hit humanity in a hundred years ravaged through the country. Its destructive trail left death and destruction all around with deliverance a distant dream.
But the nightmare did end with the promise that never again would we let such a man-made calamity hit us. Yet, four years later all that lingers of that period are piles of unused Covid test kits, masks and other useless paraphernalia like vegetable washing liquids that remind of how even in that darkest hour, companies thought only of profiting from our collective insecurities. How quickly we have forgotten the dark relentless hopelessness that bored into our collective souls!
With another Lok Sabha election just weeks away, the pandemic should have been right up there, as an election issue. But it is off the map as far as political debates on television and in print are concerned. No one is questioning how we dealt with the pandemic and the horrors of its aftermath. Even the opposition is pretending that it never happened.
Conservatively, a million lives were lost.
The visual horror of dead bodies piled high waiting for a turn in the burning ghats or the half burnt bodies floating in rivers across the nation has been wiped out. Forgotten also is our passivity. Mute, helpless witnesses to this ravaging we couldn't help anyone.
India wasn't the only country to flounder and flail in the wake of this scourge. Even in the world’s richest nation, the US, the hollowness of the healthcare system was shown up as it simply crumpled under the onslaught of the Covid virus. Who can forget the crazed hunt for just one oxygen cylinder for a parent on death bed or that one vial of Remdesivir and Ivermectin transported across the length and breadth of the country to save a life?
Of advice we had plenty: celebrity doctors issuing homilies on Covid-appropriate behaviour even as hospitals were dealing with triaging life support for patients in the face of an acute shortage of beds and oxygen. In March 2020, the health minister, himself a doctor, was assuring the nation that the virus had been contained and “simple precautions" were all that was needed to keep the deadly virus at bay. Not surprisingly charlatans among us were on overdrive pushing herbal concoctions that had no scientific basis.
During those months we realized we could live clean. We started exercising, eating healthy, cutting back on useless, high-consumption activities like OTT weddings, parties, travel and shopping. Instead of single occupancy cars cruising on roads, we had work-from-home. But less than three years later, we have been sucked back in by jubilant saturnalia. It’s party time again and to hell with the environment.
Pandemic-era social networking was about helping, with a reel life villain like Sonu Sood becoming a real life Hercules by setting up an efficient organization to supply food, medicines and train tickets to the poor and the homeless. Individual and anonymous micro philanthropy from the most unlikely of people sprouted spontaneously and without waiting for any recognition or praise.
But we are back to a dog-eat-dog world. Social media is rife with lynch mobs targeting newer victims each day. Hospitals are back to charging huge sums. Forgotten is that resolve to beef up our creaking and grossly insufficient healthcare system.
There is a good reason the Germans built monuments to the Nazi horrors when they had stood back and watched millions of Jews murdered. They remember the Nazi past so that it may never happen again. Sure, we must forget our nightmares in order to live life and move past our own helplessness in order to avoid stasis. But constant reminders are another kind of civilizational moving on.
“Survival”, wrote Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi death camp survivor who dedicated his life to documenting the crimes of the Holocaust, “is a privilege which entails obligations.” Our obligation is to keep the memory of the millions of men, women and children who lost their lives to Covid, alive. It is also to ensure that the sufferings of millions of others who survived but suffered, are not forgotten or trivialized.
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