A page from the Covid 19 days

 

It was a scary time. This is what I wrote in my diary in April 2020 when COVID-19 was on the rampage.

What does it mean to live through a pandemic, knowing that many will die and most will suffer? It’s a strange, almost surreal feeling—perhaps not unlike standing in the middle of a war.

You’re so overwhelmed by the present moment that the future becomes completely unknowable. You feel powerless, carried by forces beyond control. It’s like standing before the Himalayas and realising how small you truly are.

So, perhaps unsurprisingly, my mind feels still. I’m not thinking about what lies ahead, nor am I revisiting bad memories. Instead, I find myself reminiscing about good moments. I have no regrets, because I know life has no inherent meaning.

In times of crisis like these, I see it clearly—meaning is not fixed. It’s shaped by our vulnerable malleable minds. What feels important or insignificant is simply what our emotions choose to magnify or diminish. Even the future, should it come, may feel muted after so much loss all around. 

The virus has changed us. The future isn’t what it used to be. The past feels distant, altered. The sense of time itself has shifted. 

It is as if we have to recraft ourselves, reframe all our perspectives and look at a new life.

 

How badly we design life?

 

Life is all entropy—an unending stream of turbulence. You’re constantly battling time: sometimes rushing to grow up, sometimes trying to slow its relentless pace, and at other times just struggling against its overwhelming hold. Time can feel like an adversary. So can nature. It offers moments of breathtaking beauty, but also demands that you protect yourself from its harsher forces—rain, heat, storms, landslides, earthquakes.

In all this chaos, people could be—should be—the least hostile part of the equation. But modern society builds systems, services, and economies that push us to compete against one another. And that competition, more often than not, leads to our mutual unraveling.

Picture yourself on a fast-moving slide of time, slipping uphill or downhill, never truly in control. And while you’re trying to hold on, you're asked to make others lose.

Indian Lok Sabha Elections - A Ride like None Other

 Indian parliamentary elections are a miracle. Humungous, chaotic, and expensive. There are 970 million eligible voters, more than the population of Europe. The parties are going to spend an estimated $15 bn ( The US elections in 2020 cost  $14 bn). The 543 seats will see voting spread over a month and a half.

On one side, there is Narendra Modi, PM for the last two terms. Three times CM and according to  Pew surveys has some of the highest approvals in the world for a political leader. Leader of the Hindu nationalist BJP, he inspires passionate followers. 

The opposition is helmed by Rahul Gandhi, whose family has been right at the forefront of Congress campaigns and leadership for almost 80 years - Motilal Nehru for a few years in 1920s, Jawahar Lal Nehru from 1935 to 1964 and then after a brief gap, Indira Gandhi from 1967 to 1984; followed by her son Rajeev Gandhi from 1984 to 1991, and  Sonia Gandhi from 1996 to 2013 and then Rahul from 2014 onwards. 

This is a long way just 75 years back with the first elections when India graduated from a feudal colonised society with princely states to a constitutional democracy. Jawahar Lal Nehru had to go around in all kinds of transport including elephants to explain what voting is to the Indian public then with a literacy rate under 20%( females 9%).

The campaigns are also full of wild allegations, hectic travel, angry debates on numerous WhatsApp groups, and constant speculation by all and sundry. This is in sharp contrast to the seriousness of the issue - the direction that India will take after 4 June since the parties have very contrasting approaches to how the republic should be. 

Perfect Days - A Perfect Movie

 It was a strange first 30 minutes of the movie. 

The protagonist, a middle-aged Japanese man, wakes up, rubs his eyes, goes to the bathroom, brushes his teeth, wipes his face, dresses up in his workman clothes, picks up the car key, shuts his door, gets a can of coffee from the pay fridge, gets into his van, plays a cassette of happy sounding western music and goes about his job. He is a toilet cleaner in Tokyo Toilette and he opens the doors and with meticulous and even fond care cleans the rims and the surface of the pot, repeats this in more places, goes to a public bath, washes his body happily, sits on a park bench in the afternoon, takes a picture with his small camera( not phone), goes to a small restaurant, has a meal, goes home, lies down on the mat, switches on the light, takes out a William Faulkner novel from his well-stocked, neatly organized bookshelf, reads a bit, reaches out for his light, switches it off and goes off to sleep.

This sequence takes 10 to 12 minutes. And the second day, the same 10-minute ( or at least felt like 10 minutes) sequence repeats. So it does for another day and a few sidelights do take place. One is with a much younger toilet cleaner who is doing his cleaning job without the least bit of interest and then a brief stay by his niece Kiko who is reluctant to go back to her mother( the protagonist's sister) who is stylishly dressed and comes to pick her up in a fancy car.

Wen Winder is a German maestro and this movie fetched the lead actor Koji Yakusho the Best Actor award at Cannes 2023. 

The movie leaves an impact long after you see this. Some messages resonate powerfully. You can be contented with life's very mundane daily routines. Setbacks ( hinted in the movie - the protagonist's tastes in reading and music hark back to a more privileged life earlier) are par for the course. A clear sky, some beautiful music, and dedication to duty are enough for a good life. The movie has very few words exchanged, and the action does not even rise above the routine that also suggests, as a friend put it, you are better off by not giving words to your thoughts. Sometimes words can be a source of misery by the associations they bring.   

Individual liberty overrides group identity

 

Group identity vs. individual Liberty has played an outsized role in human progress and by inference societies. After the early Greek flourish, there was a rise of religions. First Christianity and then Islam became dominant religions. Human beings everywhere started having the wherewithal to rule over larger territories and impose control. Order in society became of paramount importance. Kings and religious leaders held sway. Tradition, precedence and discipline ruled. The progress in human thinking slowed down drastically. Till the age of enlightenment in Europe.

Newton, Copernicus, and Galileo in science; Locke, Descartes, Voltaire, Kant and many others ushered in the age of reason. This naturally led to the triumph of the individual over the group. Human rights started getting important. liberty, equality, freedom, opportunity, and tolerance became cardinal virtues in many parts of the world.

How has it helped in human advancement? Societies high on individual liberty (mostly Western countries) have come up with exceptional thinkers who have created new paradigms for progress. This has made these societies prosperous, and forward-looking thus fuelling a virtuous cycle. Many other societies which have been relatively prosperous have fallen into stasis after brief spurts.

The crucibles of these ideas are the schools and universities. The space that Governments and socities allow help them to seed the minds of these free thinkers who can wrestle with ideas with unecumbered minds.

The Guru of Statecraft

 Chanakya was a minister and strategist in ancient India. He was the chief advisor to Chandragupta who is recognised as the founder of the Maurya dynasty in Pataliputra.

Chanakya was born in Taxila(now in Pakistan) in 375 BC and he moved to Patalipitra in the East, a very large distance then. He helped Chandragupta expand his kingdom to be amongst the pre-eminent ones in the world. But he is more famous for writing 'Arthashastra', an ancient treatise on economics, politics and war. This text was lost in the 12th century but subsequently, a Sanskrit copy on palm leaves was discovered in 1905. 

The Arthashastra is a hugely influential book on statecraft in India. Many scholars now also refer to it for war strategy. It is one of the books from Asia along with Sun Tzu's The Art of War from that age that reflects the way people thought about war.

The book suggests conquest of the enemy as the final aim and the king can resort to any means to achieve his goal. This could include assassinations, bribery, creating rifts or using force. Chanakya was steeped in what is referred to as the school of realism for statecraft. The means did not matter to him.

On the contrary, India after independence was highly influenced by Gandhi for whom means were as important as ends.

It is difficult to hazard a guess whether Chanakya's ideas were successful. The Maurya dynasty floundered after three or four generations after Chanakya's death. There is possibly no reliable record of anyone using his tactics and being successful later.

Gandhi's way keeps getting questioned for his high idealism. The enduring appeal of Machiavelli and Chanakya suggests Gandhi is not fully successful either and the debate continues. 

The Riddle of Palestine and Israel

 

The world has been overwhelmed with the violence in Israel and Palestine. It was sudden, brutal and shocking. There are no words to describe the tragedy. It is on both sides now.

Human beings are strange in many ways. They are rational. But they can destroy everything irrationally too. They kill each other for religion, land and wealth. Kings did it nonstop for so many centuries. The democracies and new forms of Government, presumably with more considered decision-making have not stopped it.

The attempts for peace in Palestine have yielded hope, if at all, for brief periods. The first one for this went to the American academic and diplomat Ralph Bunche in 1948. The President of Egypt, Anwar Sadat and  Menachem Begin, the PM of Israel, got the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts at a permanent resolution of the issue in 1978. After 16 years, in  1994 the Peace Prize went to Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Izhtak Rabin and Shimon Peres, both Prime Ministers of Israel. Over a period of time, American Presidents like Carter, and Obama have also the prize for their efforts for global peace, surely most of it in this region of conflict.

This may be the nature of peace for humans. Always short-lived and mostly with very limited impact. Look at the list of the Nobel winners in Peace - Frederick Passy (1901), William Cremer (1903), Hijalmar Branting(1921), Carl Ossietzky(1935) and Jose Ramos Horta(1996) - all very much unknown names today. Contrast this with the winners in literature or economics - their names are very much in the spotlight today.

Only constant striving for peace will one day make the world free of war. That is why Gandhi is so important, as a symbol.