Economics in the time of pandemic

 

The world is going to take stock of it’s economic situation soon. The economic system we have created requires us to work to keep it moving. Only when people work will goods and services get created and the movement of which will allow money to flow and propel the economy forward. What will happen when a vehicle that was travelling at it’s full speed is brought down to complete halt in a couple of seconds? That was how lock down was implemented. But this time away from the life we have been living is very crucial for us. COVID-19 has opened many doors and windows for us to introspect on our lives and the world we have created.

First of all, this entire saga of the pandemic is totally our creation. No, this is not about the conspiracy theory of the virus getting leaked out of the virology lab at Wuhan. Its not about our health and immune system either. The fault lies with the medical insurance ecosystem we have created. The busy urban life and the taxing corporate world yanks away all our time and what we are given in return is money. When we started exchanging money for our time, we unknowingly gave away our health as well. On one side is the pressure to work more for more money which gives better social status. On the other side is the medical field taking rapid strides ahead with technology and telling us that healthcare has become so advanced and better. Health is wealth has subtly become wealth is health. The plethora of insurance companies and their policies have ensured that we do not have to bother about prevention being better than cure. So falling sick has been normalized for the working class, even cool to say “I worked so hard that I fell sick” and it is expected that older people in the family will fall sick. What has become alarming is how parents and grandparents falling and breaking their bones in their old age has also become normal. The amount of money getting spent and the effort on the family to take care of them is minuscule compared to their slow recovery and the physical pain and mental anguish they have to undergo at their age.

We are living in an alternate reality based on the concept of wealth in which insurance policies make us believe that when there is money all health issues can be treated, thereby implicitly and subtly pushing us towards diseases and getting us used to being sick. This is regardless of the facts that insurance cards are valid only in select hospitals and medical care centers, getting cashless insurance benefit during treatment is even tougher, only a certain list of diseases are covered by insurance policies, insurance companies either do not have policies for the older people or their insurance premiums cost much higher and most importantly, in spite of all the insurance cover, plenty of money is still required in hand because other expenses far exceed medical bills and getting insurance companies to pay out the insurance amounts is a lengthy and painful process. Only if everyone started to calculate the time and effort required for the entire insurance drama in terms of money.

There is a certain aura of invincibility we have created around ourselves in the belief that if we have wealth we will get access to advance healthcare and so we can fall sick and recover time and again. Diseases do not happen by accident or coincidence. Every being in nature is in the process of continuous evolution and at the heart of it is cell mutation. Microorganisms too evolve through cell mutation. The beauty of nature lies in the subtle fact that evolution is not synchronized among all the living beings. When they come in contact with one another in such an environment, biological conflicts arise. These conflicts are what we call as diseases. This is how a virus with a new mutation has caused a pandemic in our population. We will eventually evolve and adapt to the virus but not all of us will. This is where the rule of survival of the fittest becomes relevant and is one of the ways in which nature controls the population of each living being in it.

Now, two incidents to ponder over.

Even the faintest of thoughts about this would have had been ridiculed away as insanity at any other point in time. Oil prices plummeted to below zero for the first time in it’s history. That the cost of a barrel of crude oil finally settled at $-37 is incomprehensible. Twitter was so overwhelmed with tweets about it and it took me a while to figure out what had happened. Something that had become the most precious item for the entire world has become the butt of jokes in a day, the best being we are going to get paid now for using oil. To think that the entire Middle East region became what it is now because of the same oil. The higher we go before jumping into water the deeper we go inside water. Law of averages catches up with everyone and everything.

A few days back, this report from the Indian city of Agra about a truck ferrying milk falling over and a man collecting spilled milk on the road while some stray dogs were drinking milk some distance away created a lot of buzz on social media. Milk, a type of food being the common factor here, what separated the man and the stray dogs was money. When he could get the milk without having to pay money, he did what the dogs were doing. Simply put, we have reduced ourselves to the point where the only factor that separates us from animals now is money. With our higher intelligence, communication skills and ability to do critical thinking all we could achieve was to create our world based on money and wealth.

I hope COVID-19 will drive some sense back into people’s minds. The same disease that afflicts us can affect healthcare professionals too. Doctors and nurses can die, hospitals can get overwhelmed and all the insurance policies become useless when a pandemic hits us. Nothing much has changed from the medieval times of small pox and bubonic plague. Religious places of worship have been shut. The Gods seem to be helpless to protect us and we are not even able to pray to them at their places of worship. The foundation of society that has been built over thousands of years is being shaken. Why should people go to religious places anymore when we know that we can pray from our homes? When the Gods people went to pray to in religious places couldn’t stop them from dying, what’s the point in going there again?

Having no vaccine or medicines for COVID-19 is the primary reason why panic has spread among us and complete lock downs in countries had to be implemented as knee jerk reaction. Animals get attacked by scores of microorganisms every day. They don’t lock down their entire communities because they have discipline, something we have lost because of our arrogance of having superior intelligence. Animals know instinctively to self isolate themselves to prevent the disease from spreading. This makes food unavailable to them which is necessary because the entire resources of the body can be used for fighting the disease and does not have to be used to digest food. Crocodiles and turtles have survived an extinction event and many ice ages through millions of years of their existence. How many viral and bacterial invasions would they have survived?

The answers to diseases do not lie in vaccines, medicines, money, insurance policies and places of worship. Only the one that nurtures and sustains the planet can help us survive. Only in nature can our immune system evolve continuously to fight diseases. To understand this we have to first stop attacking and destroying nature and that will happen only when we stop looking at the economic value of nature’s resources. Till then more pandemics, lock downs and economic disasters like the present one will follow and if we still don’t learn, there is a mass extinction event waiting at the end of the road.

The story of a river, riots and a missed festival

So it was just another day, just another Monday. Today (Wednesday) is the starting day of the most important festival (Onam) in my state (Kerala). All Keralites converge towards their homeland during this time and as I was having my lunch close to the bus stop on Monday on my way home, my dad suddenly called me and in a frantic voice he said that riots have started across Karnataka and the situation is descending into chaos. Soon enough, I got the alert on my phone that the bus has been cancelled. It was a long travel back, but I managed to return to the safety of my rented place in Bangalore. Fast forward to yesterday morning and I stepped out to see if any shops were open. I found one shop with it’s shutters half open so I went in and picked up some stuff. As I was waiting to pay, this tall scrawny kid swaggered into the store and demanded to shut the shop immediately. He looked like one elongated drum stick. It took me a bit to hold back my temptation to ask him to go and eat some food before he starts creating trouble because one good solid blow from a policeman is enough to take his life..

I had wondered for long how a public show of protest goes so quickly out of hand. Then I saw the great migration of wild buffaloes at Masai Mara on TV and then the truth dawned on me. All the buffaloes converge to the river bank where there is a moment of uncertainty. Then one buffalo summons up the courage to get into the water and every other buffalo rushes into the water after the first one. This is called herding mentality and it is present in every species on the planet including human beings. What we need to see here is, neither do the other buffaloes know with what reason or logic did the first buffalo decide to go into the river nor are they applying their own reasoning before throwing themselves into the river. The river is infested with crocodiles who will be waiting eagerly for this time every year and I am quite sure the older buffaloes are aware of this danger but still they decide to go ahead with crossing the river. The objective is to get across to the other side for food and they have accepted some losses as collateral damage. If I draw a parallel here, the same happens during protests and riots as well. Don’t the protesters know that police will be there as well and some of them could get hurt or even get killed? There will be some people to incite the violence and everyone else would pitch in without applying any logic and without considering the danger to their own life. This herding mentality and blind faith in us are keeping two institutions in our society alive and healthy: Religion and Politics.

Erstwhile India (including Pakistan) had been littered with a large number of kingdoms for the longest time in her history. There were many who sought the glory of conquering the entire region but India’s geography and demography is so complex and complicated that none succeeded. The British were the ones who came really close to this with their divide and rule policy. I still do not understand what Indians were looking for when we stood up together and demanded independence from the British. Again the herding mentality comes into the picture here. The First World War had weakened the colonial powers considerably. Some people who foresaw the opportunity to become political leaders and rule the country exhorted the masses to stand up against the British and they duly obliged without even thinking about what they were truly looking for freedom from. The divides in the society that has existed for thousands of years exists even now and discrimination based on caste and religion continues even to this day. The assumption that a land which is so complex geographically and demographically and it’s people who are so diverse culturally could be united and brought under a book called the constitution was probably the biggest mistake that has happened in India. The fallout of this is the primary reason behind the continued flare up of tension between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

The most important reasons for the depletion of natural resources are blatant mismanagement and exponential population increase. What is sad is that people are not asking themselves why is rainfall getting lesser and why is there less water in the rivers every year. More people want to build houses every year so more trees have to be cut and more land has to be freed up for construction yet people expect rains to be consistent and rivers to be filled up with water every year. Ridiculous can also be so amazing at times. On both sides of river Cauvery are farm lands and farmers who are trying to grow crops to earn their livelihood. Why is it not possible that they can just keep aside the fact that they belong to two different states and share the water from the river equally? No, because the issue has been politicized and it has been taken out of the hands of the farmers. Now political parties and courts are deciding which side should get how much water. What is truly ironical is that the people who torched vehicles in protest and the guy who came to shut down the shop yesterday may not have even seen the Cauvery river, forget knowing about the ground reality there. Herding mentality visible here again. What I am wondering now is, which is more volatile, a border issue between two countries or the water issue between two states in the same country. The only difference I can see is, people in the two states haven’t started using guns and bombs against each other.

The heartening aspect to me though is how mobs have been destroying vehicles and other infrastructure in the past 2 days which tells me something significant. When it comes to natural resources, people have no value for money or anything related to money. Money has taken over as the fundamental aspect of all divisions in society to the extent that devotees who donate larger sums in temples are allowed to pray longer before the idols of deities. Money has even penetrated the domain of natural resources and we have been selling land and water for a long time now. For the benefit of some people who created the concept of money, the planet and the rest of the people are getting destroyed slowly. I do not know how long all of this will continue and how much destruction will have to happen before we realize our mistakes. Amazingly, all this societal decay and destruction has been very clearly prophesied in ancient Indian texts as Kali Yuga (age of Kali). I just hope this time ends sooner than later and this world gets the opportunity to start over again, preferably without human beings in it.

What do I do now that I have missed my festival? Well, there is a very significant reason why we have festivals. Our lives have been uncertain from the dawn of our existence. When we were hunters and cave dwellers, we did not even know if we would return home alive from hunting or fishing expedition at the end of the day. So we started looking for and making reasons to celebrate with our near and dear ones. Onam is the second harvest season of the year and though harvesting has reduced considerably through time, celebrations are always in full swing every year. I do not need a reason to celebrate life, every moment with my loved ones is nothing less than celebration for me. So I have told my parents that next time I am able to go to meet them that will be the time we celebrate Onam.