24 May 2021
Like how the Lord said ‘let there be light’ and there was, India’s foremost leader, PM Narendra Modi had declared that citizens needed to be Atmanirbhar and Indians became that. While toolkit is a controversial document as of now, ever since climate activist and teen Greta Thunberg was associated with one and a young lady from Bengaluru was arrested in connection with that over the farmer’s protests in Delhi’s borders, Indians have known toolkits for much much longer, forever it would seem.
If one just flipped back the pages, in an era where there was no social media, nor media access of the kind that is available today, with demonstrations through video and imagery, Gandhiji’s technique of Satyagraha and non violent resistance is a kind of toolkit that raged on its own catching the imagination of young and old alike. Folks who would not otherwise have known how to harvest salt from the elements, became overnight experts at harvesting Salt during the Salt Satyagraha. So unlike how we look today at Gandhiji’s experiments with ‘Truth’ as his autobiographical, those who lived in those times were always on the look out for the next phase of these agitations that shook the World’s Greatest Empire at that time and perhaps of all times! Each was a strategy, sold as a personal emancipator, yet each curated the will of the people and brought about a much greater hardening of will and building a most stoic and disciplined character. Just one episode, if not two will tell you about the Indians then- Jallianwala Bagh and Dharasana Salt Works. Unlike how we can think today if those hapless victims fell to British brutality and policing, resigned to their fates, we can know by reading the pages of our recent past or by reflecting on how Indians today are performing to know that Gandhiji’s toolkit is still in our DNA and we rally every resource of our character and our innate strength to the fore in any moment of crises.
Faceless Indians have today became a network of service providers offering lunch, dinner and even bread with tea as they try to rally to the cause of their neighbours. If you see the difference between the first lockdown last year, to lockdowns this year, while migrants did try to flee in apprehension, there is little evidence of any trudge like last March. It is not that some Shramik trains are running now. It is Indian hospitality that has come back on tracks. Indian brotherhood-sisterhood and legendary warmth that was recounted by early Western visitors including Mark Twain directly or indirectly, which reflected in tributes to culture and civilisation right when she was a subjugated land and colony!
When we now see bodies floating in our sacred rivers, we don’t quite understand, deracinated as we are, that this too is India’s toolkit, like jumping into the well in the Bagh was. Water is pure and our sacred waters more so. Even those now showing us sand banks near Prayagraj filled with shallow graves of the dead do not understand how, that kin knowing the elements are offering to their beloved departed, the chance to co-mingle with the waters of the sacred soon when the monsoons will devour the banks and wash away all the sins of the previous summer! Just think of how many thousands of pyres were saved from being lit, from wood being burnt, tossing up suspended particulate matter into the air! Think of how environmentally friendly to place the dead in this fashion. This is ‘native’ and this is ‘wisdom’ that knows when to mourn and when to move on…the rites and traditions of passage of the dead will not be a detritus upon the living, sparing them the wherewithal to survive some more and if possible renew and reap! But New India knows not such depth of acceptance. They place nets in the rivers, they want to bury them in the banks using earth movers. The floating dead are also a clear signal to the civilisational hotspots down stream that macabre and unsuspecting death is on its march, that they be on guard, an early warning further, of the type that is not deniable at all. I mean, if the dead show up at your banks, if it is not the Grim Reaper’s best calling card, what is? The sight of the dead, warts and all, used to be the central piece of any ritual funereal, one that was denied by use of body wraps while being handled by strangers. When the dead come back home from hospice, or from outside wherever they have passed, as they lie in state, with mourners looking upon the deceased with the riot of memories, that is when the act of dying sinks in amongst kith and kin. It not offers merely a release, a catharsis in grief, or bereavement, but it furthers the bond that they all now acknowledge at the level of their skin pores- a connection through the dead, a connection through soul realisation of the state of the deceased. So now when Covid protocol bodies are handed over by officials, we should know that this is another Indian toolkit. The dead are not infecting anymore as it is. The science agrees…
Coming to terms with shortages that we have always known or suspected is another toolkit that has made a great comeback. Making do with less, a Gandhian trait for scholars, has come right back into households across India. How to expand the ‘dal’, increasing the servings of rice, how to cook with whatever meat or vegetable is merely the culinary aspect of this ability of making do with whatever, an ingenuity toasted in better times as ‘jugaad’! So Indians are now stretching their annas, they are even running credit lines and pawning, hoping that this current dance of death offers respite in the coming weeks and they can go back as survivors to earn…Each one is gritty, keen to earn their keep, their private pacts with the Cosmic and their social compact with their Community see no conflict of philosophy or contradiction of belief. They seek for the elusive ‘nirvana’ or ‘mukti’ from all these temporal bondages even as they network and further enmesh themselves into their neighbourhoods boosting the community’s response.
In rural UP, a beloved teacher’s passing has inspired the youth. They are now doing door to door canvassing for fever and air hunger, the two clear symptoms that bedevil and possess their dear before they drop dead exhausted. They arrange chains or relays for oximetry, for oxygen, they are on remote counselling and advice of doctors and learning how to offer injections through YouTube. Most importantly their successful vigil is now rallying like virtue, gathering force across the land, a harbinger of community level awareness that is shaking them out from the shackles of a taboo that ‘Corona’ or ‘Covid’ had interred them with!
In God’s Own Country, the chain is all the way to overseas relatives. Shipments of oxygen concentrators, pulse oximeters and equipment for critical care have upgraded the facilities at the level of the PHC! There is an army of community level volunteers checking on folks who are housebound, screening them for syndromes of this virus plague and organising a step by step care that ensures the hospitals have breathing space! Even in Delhi, which witnessed a few weeks back, people in a mad panic, scampering for bed and oxygen before the great buildings that are hospitals and landmarks there, dying before their turn to be looked at, these scenes of disorganised ‘rout’ like are of a different past. Now order has returned, oxygen is available and most importantly, Indians have understood how to manage with what they have.
We can see now Indians will return to their core values and confront this pandemic. We will see such volunteering that it will rekindle our faith in our culture and our humanity. We will most importantly see how our youth can be selfless, motivated and reliable when it mattered.
Could things have been better? From self administered testing kits, to vaccines, to access to hospital beds, many of the things that came to the fore in April and May so far, so vividly documented by global and increasingly Indian media, about which column inches will keep adding as reflections and inspirations, could have been avoided largely if the administrators of New India had kept counsel with India’s timeless toolkit. They need not have heeded Rahul Gandhi who was prescient as it now appears. They could have heeded the earthy wisdom and circumspection that is the bedrock of Indian character across the ages, one that renewed itself through various vicissitudes of time!
Why when Mark Twain wrote off India “Where there are eighty nations and several hundred governments, fighting and quarrelling must be the common business of life; unity of purpose and policy are impossible.” , what would he say now of a billion plus nations and billions more governments are jostling for meagre resources and trying to find common purpose and semblance of policy in the efforts to wade through this pandemic? This sense of ordered polity, an artifice of Oneness that tries to impose a bondage upon the soul can only promote suffering for it is deaf and dogmatic, it has no nimble nature or texture of nuance to weave over different views or listen to differing voices. India has always risen to the fore, when she was left to her devices, as Gandhiji showed while leading the freedom struggle. His power over the masses was moral, it was subservience of the soul, it stemmed from not the offer of freebies or packets of biryani or choice meals, but denial of food itself to himself! Right now, across India, this moral force is the one that is gathering the wits, sharing the resources, spreading the front lines and keeping the pandemic from overwhelming India! This is India’s toolkit…One the media blinded by mass consumerism and craven display of political power and grandstanding has completely forgotten!
Even if the government does not get its act together, India’s people will & have. Even if the media does not document this unique counter now to a Chinese plague, the oral traditions will. The stuff of legend is already diluting the deadly swirl of the Corona virus and its variants, one that right now appears to hold the very idea of India in its thrall!
indiarubberman.com 