Corona Diaries 25: The Virus May Have Lost Scare Quotient, But Good Luck Still Counts

In one of these columns weeks ago, we talked about good luck. It is sheer good luck if you didn’t have a tryst with the virus and got COVID-19, nothing else, the column said.

Things stand pretty much where they were. It is still about good luck. We neither have a cure, nor a preventive for the disease. Cases haven’t peaked or plateaued. There are more reported infections and more deaths every passing day. Like earlier, we are fuzzy about the way the disease will pan out in India. The original lockdown and many repeats thereafter had limited purpose: to prepare governments to manage COVID-19 with the meagre health infrastructure they had. After three sequels to the first one, the jury is still out on its success.

The only change is COVID-19 has lost its shock value. People have realised that nothing much can be done. They have to brave it out till science discovers a way out of the virus conundrum. A distraction is what they need most now. And what can be a better distraction than going back to the routine? Governments won’t mind that. All of them understand that the cost of freezing activities is far higher than the benefit from it. If the economy collapses, nothing else holds. The cascading effect will be disastrous for the country.

The diminishing shock quotient is noticeable at the personal level. If there is a corona positive case around, the sense of panic is less pronounced these days. The same attitude is reflected in the casual acknowledgement of the rising number of cases and deaths. There’s matter-of-fact acceptance, which is not bad considering in the initial phases there was a lot of stigmatisation attached to being COVID-19 positive. The first step towards normalisation is to overcome fear. We appear headed in the right direction. We are not being paranoid.

Given we haven’t achieved much over the months through it, was lockdown a pointless exercise? No. The biggest plus has been our psychological preparedness for what follows. It could have been planned, argue some, in a much better way. Put in place in great hurry, it ignored completely the broader human and economic dimensions to the matter. Valid points, but to be fair to governments, they were waging a blind war, in unfamiliar territory. Across the world, none of them had a perfect response. Going by the general mood, the lockdown was fine. After the experience of it, getting back to normal would be smoother, and resentment against any preventive action more restrained.

Coming back to good luck, it still matters. The more we have people blessed with this X factor, the better it is for us.

A BLANK SPACE IN HISTORY?

If only we could erase the time we spent in hiding! Bad experiences, say psychoanalysts, don’t disappear. They settle deep in the subconscious mind of individuals and imact their personality in subtle ways. Does it hold true for collectivities too? Communities tend to bury experiences of defeat and humiliation deep but they survive in collective communal memory, bursting out on occasions. The pandemic, thus, would stay etched in our collective consciousness forever. It would be a painful reminder of our helplessness and the shattering of our delusion of control over the surrounding.

It would never go away for another reason: history abhors blank spaces. We cannot just pretend that the pandemic months didn’t exist. In all probability, this period will mark one of the great divides in history: pre-corona and post-corona. Right now, we are in the in-between zone, where sad endings and great beginnings exist as a fluid mix. New economies would be built from the ashes of old ones, social behaviour re-configured, cultures reimagined, and so on. People decades and centuries later, accept it or not, would remember us as the corona generation. How much so ever you wish, these months won’t vanish.

A PICTURE IN CONTRADICTION

What are the chances of the old normal waltzing back into our lives after the COVID-19 break? Well, one must mention here that we could be overthinking about the world hitting an entirely new trajectory after the novel coronavirus experience, and everything of the pre-COVID-19 age will be up for renovation. Old habits die hard and after temporary suspension they are likely to bounce back as if they had never gone away.

People adjust to changes in the economic sphere quickly because these involve existential issues, but social and cultural practices are part of the genetic code of societies. They in many ways define sets of people and differentiate them too. At a broader level, as social animals we have certain commonalities to our behavioural response to situations. People across societies respond in the similar way to victory or defeat of favourites in sporting events or to celebrities they adore or those they dislike or in case of personal tragedy or happiness. The ways of expressing basic emotions would remain the same.

In the post-corona world, this won’t change. There may be restrictions on effusiveness while letting loose feelings, but the rest will be usual. In India, all social, religious and cultural events will be back to being boisterous once, and the party scene as lively once we lose fear of the disease. Vaccine or not, it won’t be long before old habits reclaimed their space.

A LIGHTER NOTE ON THE OLDEST HABIT

While on the topic of old habits, one cannot ignore mankind’s affection for its oldest one: alcohol. Historical evidence suggests that our ancients developed the love for the tipple even before they learnt pottery, which was about 20,000 years ago. They began farming not because they wanted more food, but because they craved for more booze, says Mark Forsyth in his book ‘A Short History of Drunkenness’. His views maybe open to contest, but the fact that the journey of alcohol is nearly as long as man’s is not.

When ancient Persians had to make an important political decision, according to the book, they did it twice: once drunk, once sober. If they came to the same conclusion both times, they acted. The veracity of the statement cannot be ascertained, but as ideas go, it is interesting. On critical matters like opening liquor shops during lockdown, they could have followed the same method. The result would have been predictable though.