Living through a Pandemic, Covid-19 crisis in India.

I am regular with catching up on global news, no sooner than early December 2019, I catch myself reading about the widespread of coronavirus in Southern-China. Residing in Asia and having China as a neighboring nation made me think that this wouldn’t spread to other countries and it will only affect the Chinese.

India has had a fair share of epidemics in the past — The Plague, a bacteria-led pandemic (1896 to 1939), caused 12 million deaths; Spanish Flu, caused by a virus, claimed 12 million lives in India over a period of just three months in 1918. In both cases, the British government tried to intervene, advocate social isolation and sensitize the population. However, when the enemy is invisible, rapidly advancing and hard to explain, no amount of public or scientific advice, however reassuring it may be, is enough to dispel rumors and fear-mongering. History shows an unchanging pattern in people’s reactions–they tend to point the finger of blame at an unknown entity, be it foreigners, another religion, the health system, those who eat meat or drink alcohol.

I equipped myself with watching several videos and documentaries on the sources of this coronavirus. Browsed through various research materials and videos that developed polarity about the cause of this virus. Some claim that it is a zoonotic disease and others claim that it is a biological weapon breaking out of a medical lab in Wuhan, China, and infecting thousands around the world. Nonetheless, all these theories are proposed by people from China and those who believe it to be a biological weapon made by China. Nothing has been proved so far.

March had already crossed by then and this was real we are living in a pandemic where more than half of the world is suffering from its effects and fighting it out. Deaths in ratios of lakhs have already occurred. News channels are flooded with countries which are worst affected by this virus and the after-math of the virus. All our families were left with options of wearing a mask, complying with the social distancing at all times, washing hands and maintaining high hygiene standards and staying in lockdown in India and international flights and travelling had been put to hold.

It’s been two months that I have been living in a lockdown, scrolling feeds of internet and watching news from time-to-time about the crisis faced by India in corona times. I read about endless issues faced by people like losing jobs, migrant labor crisis, financial crisis faced by small and mid-sized businesses, inability to pay rents from March, inability to meet food and nutrition standards, thousands of people left untreated, lesser medical testing for covid-19, lack of ppe kits, ventilators etc.

Sometimes I had series of anxiety sessions. I worry about catching covid-19, I worry about not been able to perform with that efficiency standards in ‘Work from Home’ scheme that I would otherwise in normal scenario while operating from office itself. I worry about disappointing by parents, not been to meet my friends and dear ones for months. I worry that I might make bad decisions or have a poor judgment of things.

But I don’t worry for long. Because I’ve read a lot of history, and I know that scary unknowns aren’t unique to our present circumstances. We actually live with a lot more knowledge, understanding, and predictability than people have throughout history for example, that the neighboring people group will invade and kill us, our cities don’t need walls. With the evolution of science and medicine I think we should trust the medical advances to develop a vaccine or a reliable treatment to defeat covid-19 crisis.

And when that historical perspective seems too remote to speak to my scary circumstances, I think about people, who lived through pandemics and depressions and the fall of empires, the world and then came home to bring children into a world of horrible diseases and the fear of nuclear annihilation.

Yes, the pandemic is a big event. One more big event in what I expect will be a lifetime full of big events.