Beauty Of The Beast: Musings Under Lockdown

Mind is not a loner. It likes to frolic with its eternal playmate, the body. The memory, therefore, has a way of encoding itself in our senses. You take a stroll in your childhood neighborhood and suddenly the sunlight filtering through the trees is just so, a cool breeze ruffles your hair and you are instantly transported to a particular time and space long gone by. The images are sharp, and the sensations are all too real as if time is replaying the events right there and then. Or you go to your grandmother’s place and are immediately transported to another time by the signature aroma from the hearth. You can see yourself as a ten-year-old running in on a particularly bright winter afternoon, all panting, hungry and excited, to gorge on freshly done paranthas with achaar, butter or jam, only to be reprimanded to wash and change first.

Such is my state of mind these days. I was in my teens in eighties and life had a very different quality and texture to it. The air used to be clean and ambient noise much lesser. You could listen to the chirping of a variety of birds in the mornings and wonder at the Saptrishis in the night. Life had a much slower pace. There were fewer automobiles on the road, with even the better-off among us only having a Bajaj scooter to boast! Dad used to have fixed working hours and was back home by six or six-thirty in the evening. We neither had enough money nor the opportunities to go out much and so the evenings were mostly spent at home with the family to be punctuated by a Chitrahar on Doordarshan or a Chhaaya Geet on Vividh-Bharti. 

I am in my fifties now and Covid19 and the ongoing lockdown has put me in a spot. Once again, life is slow and noise is less. Mornings are beautiful and birds are aplenty. The air has a purity one had forgotten ever existed. Stars are twinkling in the nights and The Saptrishis are talking to me again. There is a lot of family time with fights over boardgames. Old and forgotten Dadima recipes are coming out once again to horrify or delight as the case may be. And although Chhaya Geet is replaced by Caravan Radio, but Rafi and Lata and Kishore and Mukesh are back crooning their melodies and melting unsuspecting hearts.

The lockdown has brought back the sights, sounds, feelings and sensations which were long buried in the overburden of day-to-day living, and has rekindled memories which have grown into a bright sunshine in the past few days. I can’t help but see quite vividly my own journey and that of my world in last three decades with a perspective which was not available to me just a month back.

I am from a generation which saw disintegration of Soviet Union, breaking of Berlin Wall, end of cold war, Bhopal and Chernobyl, end of apartheid and coronation of Nelson Mandela, South Africa playing test cricket again. Closer home, we have seen India winning the ICC world cup, entry of color TV, HumLog and Buniyaad, the liberalization, the IT revolution, the Babri Masjid, pagers and the rupees thirty-two incoming call on mobiles, the birth of internet and the agony of dial-up connections. We are a generation which evolved from pondy to porn and from paranthas to pizzas. 

I am from a generation where the middle-class tasted the fruits of economic growth for the first time. With increase in employment opportunities and more disposable incomes, we dived into the good times with unprecedented gusto and loaded ourselves with goods, gadgets and goodies. Somewhere we bought into the narrative, almost unknowingly, that if something is good more of that is better. We became the perfect consumers and ardent warriors of the free market crusade. The growing economy gave us the promise of more which we translated into demand to grow the economy further – a seemingly perfect and self-sustaining game!

Only that the game came with a cost which was borne mostly by others. A cost which we failed to acknowledge due to our own anticipation, excitement and euphoria, but mostly because of the fact that we were not the ones paying it in the first place. We failed to see the impact of our economic growth model on environment and society. 

We failed to see, for instance, that everything which we consume comes directly or indirectly from mother Earth and natural resources, many of which are non-renewable. Then how can an ever-increasing consumption for an ever-increasing population be a sustainable model?

We failed to see that in reality, demand is nothing but a real or perceived inadequacy. It is the perception of a lacking of something – a dissatisfaction or a feeling of being unfulfilled. We failed to see the obviousness of an economic growth model based solely on increasing demand resulting into higher inequality and greater frustration among the masses. Naturally, we could not see how all the economic goodness that we were partaking in was also resulting in social unrest of all kind, dilution of democracies and increase in crony capitalism. 

If only we ever asked ourselves why all the social development efforts in the world with all their good intentions and efforts are unable to make any significant impact on the problems they are trying to address, or why, a more specific example for instance, direct money transfer to the poor or universal minimum wage schemes are so fraught with obstacles and difficult to implement, we might have seen the obvious. They simply go against our economic model of growth in that they aspire to reduce the income disparity. The economists will have better explanations and arguments, but the intrinsic character of the situation can be easily grasped.

I think we were not only the beneficiaries of this global pursuit, we participated in and contributed to it handsomely.

Sitting under lockdown with my world abruptly coming to a halt, hopefully temporarily, having all the time to myself, shaken out of my reverie by sharp memories and perspectives and aided by various surrounding social and environmental cues I can’t but reflect and possibly resolve.

People of my generation and background, educated, intelligent and privileged as we are, are sitting in positions of influence world over – in governments, corporates, technology research and political thinktanks. We are the decision makers and our decisions will shape the future of the world. Covid19, which came unannounced and almost out of nowhere, has catapulted us to a point of inflection in our combined history. We can choose to come out of this lockdown resorting to our old models and resuming the journey along our old path only to lead into another global crisis of a similar or bigger magnitude, albeit not necessarily biological, in perhaps not so distant a future.

Or we may choose to act differently by recalibrating our priorities. We can work together to develop new and sustainable growth models taking into consideration economic, social and environmental impact of our actions even when it means showing immense grit and courage to depart from the old and the comfortable in favor of the new and the uncertain.

Maybe it is time to look at a contribution driven model of growth rather than a demand driven model?