India and Covid-19
India is an enigmatic country. Those who have visited India, know about the treasures this country withholds within its cultural diversity. The difference in culture and way of living visibly occurs as you travel around 500 miles in any direction from anywhere in India, and yet, we all live together as a tightly knit unit.
I am a civil engineer by profession and an entrepreneur by choice. There have been lots of debates going around recently about how ingeniously we handled the Covid-19 crisis last year and how millions of us succumbed to the virus this year. With the current pandemic as the point of reference, I will try to dissect the ground reality.
What we did Right?
We followed the age-old brown mom’s traditional cleanliness practices. Every Indian household follows a strict regime of separate outside clothes and home clothes. This is a no-brainer in the majority of Indian homes. Most of my Indian readers would agree that our moms really followed the ritual of changing and keeping clothes aside as soon as we entered the home since time immemorial. And now the whole world follows that!
Another most important thing we did was staying at home for a prolonged duration, because, finally we got some time off! It should come as no surprise as the Indians are some of the most hard-working human resources available out there. We finally got to get home, stay indoors and be lazy again, because we’re built like that actually.
And finally, we learned how to cook. Homecooked food with the thousands of combinations of spices that we use literally saved our lives. Doctors started emphasizing an immunity-building diet but we have been doing that for centuries in India! The variety of vegetarian diets that we follow regularly helped evolved our defenses over a long period of time.
So, what went wrong then?
We got complacent after the first wave.
This is the only biggest reason why our medical infrastructure was overwhelmed hour after hour and day after day. The second wave started as a sudden chain reaction and wiped out millions of people all around the country. Even after taking so many precautions and realizing that we can beat this virus by following Covid-appropriate behavior, we could not save the lives that should have been saved.
We tried continuously for days to save as many lives as we could, with every single person with access to a smartphone and internet desperately trying to reach out and help as many as we could. This time, the inability to handle the panic led to a disaster and suddenly people started falling all around.
Our mishandling of the pandemic was another reason why the pandemic became a disaster for us. Till the time people could understand and digest the seriousness and scale of the infection, countless deaths occurred across the length and breadth of India. This was due to the overconfidence and frustration of the people in general. Overconfidence because we beat it the first time and frustration of being stuck in one place for almost 3 months.
We succumbed to the virus this time because of another reason that no one talked about. The emotional burden on thousands of medical and health professionals who fought fiercely lost their own lives, and are still fighting to the death to beat the virus. Their resilience ought to break somewhere and slowly, the trauma started getting on their nerves.
As I write this article, my thoughts go out to all the medical and health professionals around the globe for being their efforts.
Conclusion
While we are still fighting the novel coronavirus pandemic, I feel there’s a need to understand that the war is not over yet, and will not be over soon. There are a plethora of factors in play that will determine our future take on life. Some people are scared of vaccinations, while some are confident of it. Some still believe that this was all a hoax, while some are left with a lifetime of trauma. There are still a majority of people who debate that the administration and government failed miserably, while there are others who understand that dealing with a deadly pathogen as this was in our own hands in the first place.
I am hopeful that India will stand again on its feet after been beaten down to its knees by an invisible monster. And we will rise wiser.
