Hi All,
This article may be cynical and perhaps a little self-indulgent. If you don’t want to read yet another pointless pontification on India’s Covid crisis, I would recommend skipping right to the end to the list of places you can contribute in case you haven’t already.
The last time when I felt this scared that home was under attack was during the Coimbatore bomb blasts. A miasma of fear and anger gripped us all. A sense of impending doom hung on the town like a storm cloud. It left a scar in me for sure. I also remember how people rallied together, how the army was brought in and things were brought under control.
There were other shocking events. Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination comes to mind. I saw my grandmother actually have a tear in her eye that time. More personally, I remember that my Perima and family were coming to visit us that day and suddenly the country was at a standstill with no transportation running. I was eight at that time and when you are eight you think super local.
The Bombay blasts were news events for me. Shocking, but did not register them personally and disappeared from memory soon. Kargil war evoked a nationalism that I did not realize existed inside me except in cricket matches - the sacrifices of it were packaged by the media as stories of valor you could be proud of. Then there were so many terrorist attacks and bombings. Now that I think about it, something was going down all the time. The 2008 Mumbai attacks gripped me for weeks with rightful anger against the inept government and the laissez-faire national defense.
If you grow up in India, you will very soon realize that human life is cheap. Very cheap. You watch deaths pile up in various forms everyday. Forget the bombings and terrorist attacks - they actually killed fewer people than all the other things that kill Indians everyday. Crowded bridge collapses. Train accidents. Road mishaps. Buildings that collapse in the rain. Villages that burn. Gas cylinder explosions. Caste violence. Religious riots. Floods. Droughts. Girls killed at birth. Honor killings.
You become immune. You are in eternal crisis mode that you forget that you are in a crisis. The government is this big, inefficient, corrupt machinery you’ve given up hope on. You do not rely on them for good security, good roads or good services. Yet, when elections come around we pull the D card and prod the country into voting. The politicians themselves promise the world and it all works beautifully. Meanwhile, we try not to pay taxes as much as possible and the engine chugs on.
Obviously, the government isn’t the only problem. How do you explain all the caste violence, girls being killed at birth, child labor, rape and all of the other stories that surface everyday. Governments don’t operate in vacuum. They aren’t air dropped here with their agenda. They give people what they want. We get the government we deserve.
Like I said, you become immune. This is India. Things are inefficient. Things break. People show extreme hospitality and do heartwarming things on one side and they also do the most heinous things to each other. All at the same time. Oh, the glorious chaos of this country and all that.
Even in the age of digital nomads and global village (more like global islands thanks to Covid), the country is a major source of anyone’s identity. I might shit on India all I want but the moment someone from outside shits on it, I get defensive. I feel the need to balance their often biased view. So, how do you resolve all of this in your head and continue feeling proud?
No wonder we cling to the past like crazy. We need good stories about ourselves that transcends what we see on the ground. We need the myths of superiority and ultimate knowledge. We need to believe that innately there is something fundamentally good, nah great, inside of us. As for the present, we take solace in words like spirit, jugaad or wherever we call it. Things are broken but we are survivors. We celebrate the Indian who rises to something meaningful in the world (usually in the US) and feel like one of our daughters is showing what we can all be.
However, I have increasingly felt despair in the last several years. I thought this was supposed to be the decade where we leverage the massive advantage of the information era, an actual opportunity and area of strength to build for the future. I thought that we would use science and cheap technology to revolutionize and leapfrog many cycles. Quite wrongly, I’d assumed we were competing with China for the coming era.
Instead, we were benchmarking ourselves against Pakistan - a near failed-state. We are drowning in even more superstition and religious hate. Instead of investing in Artificial Intelligence, we are investing in temples and statues. For a large majority for whom we should now be finding opportunity to use the new digital tools, improve access and unleash the learning power of the internet, the governments and those that get to benefit are unleashing fake news and peddling the idea that science is somehow ‘western’.
Most dangerously, we are being fed this lie that we know all there is to know. In fact, we know nothing. No one does. At least any civilization on the ascent assumes this. When you start assuming you know everything, it’s the sign of decline.
And now we have possibly the worst crisis I’ve seen in India in my lifetime. Nearly 2 lakh people dead (and increasingly it looks like this number may be underreported by 5x or even 10x). Crematoriums are busy. Hospitals are spilling over. We’re running out of vaccines and medicines. Millions may not even access in the best of times now die without care. Life is cheap in India but I wasn’t aware that it was this cheap.
Even if we get out of this bloody but surviving, I do not yet see what’s setting us up for the coming decades to bring a billion of us up in the standard of life and wealth, improve healthcare and establish scientific rigor in this country.
One thing that gives me hope are the entrepreneurs in the country - the doers rather than talkers. The way they’ve rallied their network, skills, money and time is the light at the end of the tunnel for me. We should all stop celebrating the movie stars, the cricket stars, the politicians who peddle hate and instead celebrate these entrepreneurs. We should be creating millions more of them and perhaps rightfully indulge their occasional ‘I carry the world on my shoulders’ self-aggrandizement. At least, they deserve it more than the spineless celebrities we have amidst us today.
Anyway, this is me getting carried away. India needs to survive this nightmare first without setting us back by more than several decades. Let’s contribute in ways we can (time, money or even information). Below is a list of all the places that are getting circulated - all verified so there shouldn’t be anything scammy here. So, please go ahead and open up your wallets.
Could be better,
Tyag
Resources for information
Kickass dashboard for resources : Select a city or state and pull up information.
Resources list 1 (evolving): Should help those who need it find oxygen suppliers, hospital bed availability, testing centers, care at home contacts and food delivery sources.
Resources kit #2: Evolving list of all resources (oxygen, Remdesivir, Beds, Vaccination, etc.)
Places to Donate
Huge master list of ongoing fundraisers going on.
Another master list with places to contribute
Hemkunt Foundation: Doing Oxygen drive throughs to fund and provide oxygen to those needed. Immediate need of the hour. https://hemkuntfoundation.com/donate-now/
Vaccine beneficiary list: If you want to sponsor vaccines for home help, security, service folks in apartment or even those that need, you can sponsor vaccines by listing them here. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc6Q1C4S253ZR4gH8LEx_h981e9M-hLVPLbsgMSv3jIGSKx9Q/viewform
Give India: https://indiafightscorona.giveindia.org/?order_id=LC607ebe4c47de6
Aid India: https://aidindia.org/responding-to-coronavirus/
Akshaya Patra: https://www.akshayapatra.org/covid-relief-services
Myna Mahila: Distributing sanitary napkins to women from low-income, slum communities. Also organizing free telehealth consultations with doctors.
https://mynamahila.com/get-involved/donate/
Apnalaya: Emergency rations to those in need in Mumbai.
Ketto Covid Relief Fund: Many India specific appeals and missions. https://covid19.ketto.org/.
Including this oxygen one: https://www.ketto.org/fundraiser/mission-oxygen-helping-hospitals-to-save-lives
Plan India: Provides protection kit, economic support and health kit to laborers and others in need. https://www.planindia.org/get-involved/make-a-donation/covid-19-crisis/
Support mental health need of covid frontline workers:
https://www.ourdemocracy.in/Campaign/covid19mentalhealth
Milaap fund requests: Example: https://milaap.org/fundraisers/support-hbs-hospital
Goonj: Rahatcovid project helps migrant workers, farmers, https://goonj.org/support-covid-19-affected/
Uday Foundation: Delhi is under second lockdown due to Covid 19. Please make a small contribution to provide food to the needy and homeless.Donate One Month’s Food Supply (Flour, Rice, Pulses, Cooking Oil and Other Food Items).
https://www.udayfoundation.org/coronavirus-disease-covid-19/
It's honestly getting crazy. Everytime I am getting a call from anyone in India, my heart is racing assuming the worst!