Life In The Times Of Corona
Long back I read a blog by Marc Andreessen titled 'why software is eating the world', the world today reminds me of it as Corona starts eating it bit by bit. I remember joking about it with my friends in December about this new virus from China that might wipe out population from across the world. Little did I realise that most of what I said that day might turn into reality. But this blog isn't about the Novel Corona Virus popularly known as #COVID19 or Corona Virus Disease. Its a virus seemingly mysterious in nature that has perhaps one of the largest virality among known diseases although the fatality is merely 3%. Although it impacts mostly old people, infants and people with weak immune system, it has created more of a pandemonium across the globe due to its highly contegious nature. Add to it the fact that there is a shit load of false information on the web and you find most people across the country are scared to death. Let me discuss a bit about life in the times of Corona.
To start with, let me not forget to mention a trip I had planned in February 2020. In my earlier life , I did not get a chance to visit South East Asia save Singapore. Thus I planned a trip with my childhood friends to Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand. But before I could start buying stuff for my trip, the Corona pandemic hit the world. We felt it might subside over the next month or so but it became a pandemic. With a heavy heart I had to cancel my tickets and incur a loss of around 50K. As I was recuperating from this tragedy, Corona became a global outrage. It was spreading far more insanely than the forest fires of Australia. Corona over the last one month has become the most important news across the globe. Almost every other type of news that captured the audience's attention has disappeared into oblivion. Shaheen Bagh guys are still wondering what hit them. People have just lost interest in any other news. Every single day unpacks some new surprises about the Corona Virus. As an Indian, one comes across all types of news. Some being entertaining and others purely horse crap. When doctors worldwide were talking about finding a cure to Corona, we had our own political clown Ramdas Athawale come up with his own magical potion to fight Corona.Take a look
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dPd708Sk98
As I was recovering from the laughter bout this video brought, I got another shocker. This is actually a bunch of aunties doing incantations to fight Corona. And I always thought Vodoo or black magic was all folk lore :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v94rPP6rCFE
Corona has triggered some really important discussions on the web. Earlier Hiten Shah and Brianne Kimmel and many other guys from the Valley would talk extensively about the future of remote work, something which isn't quite popular with employers across India. An employer is always averse to the idea of remote work in India, but ever since Corona dug its fangs deep in our country, almost every employer in India has turned to Sunny Jesus, son of God and is requesting its employees to work from home. That gave rise to a bigger problem. Most ISP's who have been marketing their broadbands for decades with glam marketing punchlines, have been reduced to tatters as they haven't seen such scale of usage till date. When 75,000 people start using their home broadband 16 hours a day using heavy tools, it takes a toll on the ISP's server. Most broadband connections bombed and had a large group of people complaining. Wonder where that Airtel girl is these days :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvjjCdkyydw
Everywhere across the Startup community in India, there is a lingering prayer that ends with a cute note-'Save me'. In fact ever since Corona became a pandemic, I can barely hear stories about funding, IPO, engineering, design, product management, marketing or anything far more sinister. Every startup in the country is talking about WFH. In fact a bunch of startups are so devastated by this apocalyptic scenario that they have pledged they'd ensure every employee they got WFH. But WFH could be tricky especially if you have a family. This professor created history when his kids accidentally bumped into a room where he was appearing live on BBC. The world noticed just the kids and they became overnight internet sensations and thousands of memes came out. Take a look
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mh4f9AYRCZY
The Professor was so devastatingly distraught that he had to appear in a different video to justify his stand. Take a look
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLMSoD1riE0
By the time this video picked up virality , the world had moved to Hassan Minhaj's criticism of Modi ji.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqZ_SH9N3Xo
Anyway in the Northern part of India where Corona still isn't that serious an issue, some saffron clad God Man came up with an innovative way to boost your immunity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exUoaEtgdZg
This female politician popped up on the surface with unabashed confidence and unparalled conviction about a potential cure which paralyzed a few people who couldn't stop laughing- LMFAO :)
Whilst all this was happening, Akhikesh Padav thought it best to wage a silent war on the current establishment with his motley crew of socialists.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkBEFa98URg
It was exactly then, that West Bengal, declared its own set of Contrarian news by proudly flaunting the fact that they had more of H1N1 than Corona and had won the battle against Corona. Post that the Communists moved back to their eternal battle against CAA/NPR. Last I heard there wasn't much noise coming from that side of the country.
Bollywood too became super pedantic on instaverse, twitterverse and on Facebook. Katrina Kaif had a sudden change of heart and decided to exercise on her roof from where one could see the ugly Mumbai buildings, something she had managed to hide all this while. Her messaging was clear- One can exercise in their homes too, if one is in isolation. Little did she know that not many of us can afford Yasmin Karachiwala with our limited salary cheques.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbzHHMyKizU
As we were receovering from Katrina's insane moves, the world suddenly exploded on Neha Dhupia. Wondering who she is. Well for most people who don't seem to place her well in their memory castles, she is a former actress, model and now a host on one of the most popular shows on Indian TV called roadies which has gained far more importance in the youngster community than Ivy League Colleges like MIT, Harvard could ever think of. Youngsters who can't qualify for roadies subject themselves to abject misery and torture. So the hoopla was all about the show where Neha was a judge and she managed to assault a young guy on the subject of infidelity and all hell broke loose. Poor thing has been getting hate messages to and fro from all parts of the country and she has no clue how to retaliate. Luckily Bollywood has come to support Neha's antiques since they were in lockdown due to Corona and had nothing better to do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJIui7gv69k
Amidst all this bizarre happenings, somebody created a dashboard for Corona
Now we at least know the status quo. India was also hailed for its efforts to curb the Corona Pandemic. Mr Modi's government was widely hailed for its ingenious efforts to rescue its citizens stranded in China and Italy and for also helping neigbouring countries with their evacuation. At least on mass media the picture looks real rosy. Even for Kamal Nath whose Government is about to disintergrate as Jyotiraditya Scindia moved to BJP after being a sidekick to the really talented Congress scion Rahul Gandhi whose pet name 'Pappu' is more famous across the country than his real name. Kamalnath's Government rejoiced when his floor test was shifted to a later date due to the Corona Scare.
While all this was happening we had a certain section of Sanghis who declared Corona as Kalki, the tenth avatar of Lord Vishnu. Kalki is supposed to come and start the destruction of the world toward the end of Kalayuga. It sent shock waves to the opposition camp who were recovering from kamal Nath's collapse, powerful enough for Montek Singh Ahulwalia to come up with his own playbook for building a free market economy.
In the meanwhile the stock market lost something North of 700 B USD worldwide, which gave Rana Kapoor the proper excuse to justify his stand after Yes Bank shut down leaving millions of customers in existential crisis. But what is more important at this point in time is to see if we are equipped to face such a pandemic or not. Long back Peter Thiel had come back with this verbal jab,"We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters". People and intellectuals worldwide dismissed the quote citing it as silly since Jack Dorsey largely was hailed as the quintessential American businessman tabloids had seen decades earlier in John.D.Rockfeller. The tech mogul had founded Twitter and Square and twitter ,was seen as the modern age tool for revolutionaries ever since it triggered the Arab Springs and helped people snatch their freedom away from some tyrannical despots. Noam Chomsky would have perhaps written an entire chapter on Dorsey till few realised twitter can barely monetise. But people missed the larger message of Thiel's quote. What Thiel and a lot of other luminaries like Bill Gates have reiterated over time is nothing less than an impact of the Dunning Kruger effect. We don't realise how useless our technology is, till something like a Corona comes knocking our doors. I would still say India is far better than the US because as a third world country we know our limitations and thus we use religion from time to time to compensate for our inability to have adequate tech to handle such pandemics. We have even bought our mass media to only relay things which might sound like music to everyone's ears.
I am privy to a lot of conversations about how tech is eating the world by people in Silicon Valley from time to time and even in India. Everyone is so fascinated by how exponentially technology has grown or how it is now used in every aspect of business or how it is driving the entire world. Unfortunately the facts speak otherwise. We have had patterns of such viral attacks for over the last few decades(SARS, MERS,Ebola,Nipah). Inspite of all that we still do not have any amount of control over such exigent situations. It is appalling to see how ill prepared we are in the wake of a calamity like Corona which luckily has a very low death rate somewhere ranging between 3 to 5 percent. What if this were Ebola that has a more than 40 percent death rate? It would perhaps result in an entire wipe out of Gen Pop. So tech is definitely out and maybe the only notion that sticks is Darwin's 'Survival of the fittest' where people with weak immune systems would be flushed out as part of natural selection and only the strongest seem to survive. That translates to higher mortality rates per square kilometre. The weirdest thing is, there is absolutely not much information about the virus and about its mutations that could help develop an antidote. Though US claims to have developed a vaccine to counter the Corona attack, by the time it would be manufactured for a mass market would be perhaps 2 to 3 years from now which translates to billions of casualties worldwide.
Another topic that I've heard again from Silicon Valley folks that you might also hear in India is the need to scale up as fast as possible. Hyper growth is considered the key to succcess and that might have resulted in several startups shutting down due to the absence of a formidable business model. What is really surprising is that almost all the startups that have spoken about scale are finding it extremely difficult to provide commodities to people amidst this Corona pandemic. Some of the biggest eCommerce vendors and commodity traders are finding it hard to cope up with an exponential surge in consumer demand. Today I am gobsmacked to see most of the online vendors are failing at supplying to a large population that doesn't want to visit the super markets. The Sanitizer market has exploded with sanitizers going out of supply. Most sanitizer manufacturing companies have increased their prices six fold. Its a really busy day for eCommerce vendors and they are finding it extremely difficult to cope up with this magnitude of demand. At this juncture no one is talking about scale and I hear absolutely no stories on how hype growth will drive a company to profitability because its clearly a lie. These are actual testing grounds for a company and failure to operate efficiently in the current climate would reveal a lot of loopholes. Any smart managers if they are reading this might get the hint.
India although has been able to suppress things for the time being but the larger question that no one is answering is-if the numbers are correct? I am not sure if we are reporting the right numbers. My theory is predicated on the simple concept that-People infected with the #COVID19 virus are subjected to basic checks on the airports. We all know that in a majority of cases, people infected with Corona don't seem to show any symptoms. These guys if let go could go and infect the Gen Pop and the chain reaction starts. People like them called super spreaders would start showing symptoms post 14 days and would then be kept in quarantine and treated but they would have come in contact of so many people by then that a large number of people would have gotten infected and that's how the Virus spreads to a large part of the population through community transmission. What is even more worrisome in the wake of the spread is that we really don't have sufficient medical facilties to deal with such cases involving massive scale. Unlike South Korea where Mass Testing is done, in India it takes 24 to 48 hours to receive your reports back. More so even if you're quarantined with 3 more people suspected of the infection, there might be a possbility that a healthy person might be infected. I heard about people who were let go at the airport and they went ahead and resumed work and then later on they were found positive. These people could have gone and infected few other people they would have come in contact with. This might turn into one of the biggest epidemics the country has ever seen after the Bubonic Plague of 1897.
Add to that the fact that hygiene is not one of our strong points and you are looking at a potential armageddon situation. More than half of the Northern belt is completely devoid of hygiene. People don't wash their hands before consuming something. People throw trash on the roads. There is open defecation even after 'Toilet-Ek Prem Katha' showed the ill effects of such a move. People spit across the length and breadth of the country. There isn't proper drainage in most cities in North India resulting in the breeding of mosquitoes that cause diseases. Food on the streets and many shops are not cooked in a hygienic way using the best in quality food items. Most people still believe diseases are caused by supernatural entities and avoid doctors leading to large number of deaths across the year. An average Indian touches his face close to 3000 times per day as per a WHO statistic. Then when you include the simple fact that most of the Northern belt is devoid of state of the art medical faciltiies, you are looking at a very large number of casualties due to lack of medical care to infected people.
If this virus continues its menace over the next few months, then we are looking at another global recession that might last for a while. That could mean reduce in demand in an already ailing economy. That could translate to millions of job losses across the country in almost all the sectors. The question is-how prepared are we economically to battle the after effects of the Corona pandemic? With the KPI's speaking poorly of our economic performance amidst the current slowdown due to lack in demand , if we add an economic recession then it would perhaps drag our growth rate down to 2 percent. That could spell trouble for the country as most businesses would collapse and there would be unimaginable chaos on the streets. Economy going down has its own share of demons. It would see a surge in unemployment rate as a majority of businesses in a bid to survive would start downsizing its staff. It would also increase the fiscal deficit load on the state treasury. It would also lead to a drainage of FDI from the existing national projects that are providing employment to organised and unorganised labour across the country resulting in further job losses. An economic avalanche of this size and proportion isn't something we have battled till date. The few recessions in the past were neutralised due to the centralised banking model in India and saved us from crumbling down but this one could leave a bitter taste in everyone's mouth. It is even more troublesome purely due to the fact that we don't have economists in the establishment who could understand the fundamental problems and fix them using a set of effective policies. Fareed Zakaria had once mentioned in his bestseller 'The Post American World' that India will perhaps never become a super power because of multi party democratic framework where policy implementation is a major problem.
As Indians I think its time for us to leave aside our differences and unite ourselves in our endeavour to fight this pandemic. The reason is because there isn't any other option. We have never taken our freedom and the benefits it provides seriously and today is exactly the time when we need to think differently. I believe a lot of issues in the current climate is because of misinformation and that could be extremely detrimental to people. If we manage to go to credible sources and validate our facts before spreading it on to 10 more people, it would help better educate people on the intricacies of #COVID19 and might save lives. It is also the time to maintain extremely high sanitation and hygiene to keep ourselves and our families safe. What is also important is to ensure you take the right amount of healthy vitamins in your diet to stregthen your immune system. The Corona Virus could spell trouble for only a small section of the society that don't have strong immune system but for the rest of the diaspora it might not impact that much. But having said that, its also important to lead our lives to the fullest. People are seemingly scared and somehow the fun element in life has disappeared and that is what keep us running. We can't let Corona take over and decimate our happiness. It's time to put this Corona thing to rest and take control of our lives. In the end we will always prevail as we have done over the last 2 million years.