Crimea River

China is the latest Honours Subject from the University of Social Media. The recent standoff reported from Ladakh and similar incidents in Sikkim etc seem to have taken some attention away from the overwhelming corona issue. However, a major realisation has occurred that, ‘boredom’ is a strong emotion. Barely a few months into the COVID crisis, with loss of lives and livelihood on the rise, we already have a bored Pakistan pushing in terrorists, while seeking loans and China playing the intimidation game at third party borders; India – Tibet and India - Nepal. While globally, Venezuela’s collapse, Hong Kong protests and the Taliban agreement also deserves focused attention, our immediate neighbourhood has plenty to fill our hands.

 

Papers, TV and the net is full of what allegedly happened, what might be happening, backgrounders, China’s Theatre Commands, Theaterisation of Indian forces and who said what. Serious operational matter for some, but Home Theatre for most. Disputes below a threshold, as an external policy have been a favourite amongst imbalanced relationships. Economic tinkering, Election meddling or territory slicing, the world has been seeing it all. Callously unconcerned, as long as it was someone else’s problem.

 

Annexation of land is not new. Despite being a taboo in recent international politics, territorial assertions have been happening. And while they do cause much heartburns and human plight, wars also have not brought decisive results for the same, except maybe the Falklands War. We still have the Line of Control with Pakistan after many wars. Even creation of Bangladesh and an all out defeat of Pakistan, did not lead to the integration of Jammu & Kashmir with Pakistan occupied J&K and Gilgit Baltistan, while Shaksgam Valley & Aksai Chin remained with China adding on to the unsettled borders of the Heaven on Earth.

To be clear, Borders have shifted throughout history and there will always be groups that, for ethnic or religious reasons, feel they are stranded in the wrong country. But allowing a new nation such as East Timor or South Sudan to break free, usually through a negotiated and internationally recognised referendum, is very different from allowing an existing nation to forcibly seize part of a neighbour’s territory. China has long threatened to militarily integrate Taiwan, Israel vs Palestine has been a continuous struggle but Crimea is the example that comes to mind when annexation is spoken of. Be it reasons of region, religion or access to the Black Sea, Crimea is now added to the list of disputed territories that everyone knows and cant do much about. These regions eventually harmonise to an equilibrium that enables life to go on with the notion of choice remaining an illusion created by the haves for the have-nots.

 

Every time there is a standoff with PLA in our northern borders, it is dealt with. How it gets reported, is another story. It is difficult to pin the reason or blame for that, as when the news is not raising patriotic fervour on the military’s work it is giving out analysis on how the budgets should be slashed for audit prudence, leaving both aspects reduced to symbolism for prime time. This gives little space to summarise simple facts:- We have threats on the borders. We need to contain them in the present and we need to build credible & effective deterrence for the future. Foreign policy can be based on intentions, but defence policy can only be based on capability.

 

Game of political optics aside, India today is not a push over. If this is a retribution for reducing imports, asking WHO did what, calling out OBOR a money trap and supporting countries troubled by Chinese imperialistic designs, then, it must be realised that, isolated military misadventures in Ladakh wont change the exposed public face of the Middle Kingdom. Yes, there are ways that China can hurt us, but there are also ways for us to act where China won’t like it. What and how much to do is best left to the experts on the ground.

 

Thing that baffles the most is, what does China get from all this? Bad relations with most neighbours, further worsening of international image, a synonym of everything cheap to buy but expensive to own and a friendless global playground. On the Indian side as well, the Himalayas are a natural watershed and Tibet a beyond economical pursuit. None of the southern neighbours have ever threatened the British drawn limits. It has always been the Chinese who have continued to nurture disputed areas, as if looking for excuses for disputes. Myanmar, Bhutan, Nepal and India, all have suffered the imposed superiority of Chinese through military incursions, leaving only Pakistan that has traded partial sovereignty for border peace while assuming enemy of my enemy is a friend.

 

As an aspiring superpower, China could have done better by leveraging its civilisation, culture and diversity towards a more symbiotic ecosystem with its neighbours and global partners. Taking a path of human inclusivity and mutual benefits for spreading the soft power of their oriental way of life and added to this its industrial powerhouse would have ushered a different century for the world, possibly bereft of a lot of infructuous exchanges.

 

Towards Ladakh or Sikkim, favourable weather incursions may be an effective ploy to temporarily channelize opinion, but it can’t serve any long-term gain. The second biggest standing armed forces won’t wither away like some Guangzhou Counterfeit Nike and the colder it gets, the harder it will be for the dragon to breathe fire. The buildup might cause political entropy here but that is only because a democracy affords that to its people. Being non-existent back in China, out of fear of the nature of free will, the people there don’t get to decide who will be their country’s enemies or friends.

 

Sometimes we are just collaterals in our wars against ourselves. Snatching away doesn’t work with kids and toys or with men and territory. History is not destiny and rules of Crimea don’t apply to  the Himalayas. If you are sad that the world does not take you well, change yourself. From being a poor and weak country that not many liked, you are now a rich and strong country that not many like. Fighting us won’t change that. Cry Me a River.

Netflixing Life

It has become ‘normal’ to say that we are headed towards a ‘new normal’. The most similar analogy I see is the query, ‘Who let the Dogs Out?  Nobody knows ‘who’, but it’s catchy! We can only try and conjecture as to what that new state will be, but then, what else are ‘lockdown analysts’ for? Being a digital warrior, the binary scenarios I play are, End of the World vs Evolutionary Prosperity. The real life will give us something in between, but it highlights the futility of worrying, as in either case choices remain a linear progression of options.

 

We may try holding on to the past, it is not a bad thing, but life has been changing anyway. The dusty old bazaars were sidelined by the convenient Superstores, then the malls pushed them aside and made shopping a getaway experience till eCommerce exploited our inertia and made our devices the market and us, a product. Entrepreneurship has also changed from the idea of just giving the people what they want, to design thinking; giving people a need they never knew they had and then selling goods and services to fulfill that. So apart from the fact that we are being forced to change in a short timeframe, this situation is just ‘normal’.

 

Fareed Zakaria, on this change said, in one of his shows, that this opportunity that we have got to formalize a new way of life can also be used to deviate from the ills of the past that had got ingrained in our lifestyles. Aspects like excessive burning of fossil fuels, meat production, wasteful electricity consumption and even population growth were never sustainable models and as we sit and decide about the future of our civilisation, cleaning up the canvas and harmonising with the earth just seems even more prudent. As far as us in India, it should be easy. For centuries, life on Jambudvipa was based on balance with nature and now when the multinationals (actually corporations beyond nations) package our ancient concoctions like Turmeric Latte, Toothpaste with Salt / Charcoal, disposable leaf plates, 9 Day fasting, Yoga etc. An endless list keeps scrolling on how fundamentally strong we, as a civilisation were and even today, are.

 

The change will neither be immediate nor easy. Years of vested interests and invested mindsets will friction the move, but they, like many others in the past, are likely to get ‘Netflixed’. The popular streaming service and many similar others today are hot-stocks and the story is same for most non-contact service providers. The twentieth century buzzword, “Globalisation” stands to shrink to such non-contact products while giving way to ‘regional self dependence’ in other physical consumer goods. Like it or not, democracy in manufacturing will define the next industrial wave. Intellectual Property will stay as the fundamental ownership, but growth will be in down-scaled factories catering to regional markets and eventual progression in 3D Printing may further lead to corporations like Amazon supplying substrates and people printing whatever they need in the comfort of their homes.

 

Still as social animals, we have been known to move mountains to be with each other. Can the idea of long-term isolation be sold to such a mind set? Or can we partially sacrifice privacy and develop individual sensor bands (like a Fitbit) that broadcast our real-time infection status and tag us and our surroundings, Go / No Go. Fear of misuse and stigma will always remain, but like hijackings and 9/11 changed Airport Security, this sensor based social life, might not be a distant future. Tracking apps, in a still nascent form, are already in use in many countries, including India (Arogya Setu). 5G bandwidth may just be the platform needed for billions of these active devices to talk to each other. The race to dominate this sector is about to explode.

 

 It is strange that solutions to life, Post Corona, being thought of today, lie at the extreme ends of the time spectrum. Ancient and futuristic ideas are converging for maintaining our average modern lives and this new cocktail may just be the cheers we need to welcome life as it will be known. Nature is divine in its ways, just when the caterpillar thought the world is over, it became a butterfly.

 

Where the Streets Have No Name

It is often said that migrants, like other ethnic minority workers, are the last hired and first fired. This is certainly the case today as a consequence of the global economic and financial crisis. Businesses are no longer hiring new staff and there are major lay-offs, generally starting with dismissal of temporary workers. Some companies are resorting to adhoc arrangements, such as reduced hours and pay for personnel remaining on the payroll or putting workers on part-time employment or unpaid leave, but, the growing uncertainty leaves more question marks than assurances.

It was a short period of ‘denial’ before the world woke up to Covidisation. Reality jumped many quantum levels with a still continuous redefining of the stable state. Those who risked being in the valence shell in hope of keeping connections, suffered the lack of nucleus protection and the nature of the virus that indiscriminately made all bonds, lethal. The lockdowns have emerged as the only prevention while we search for a cure, but #StayAtHome is not an option for everyone. Especially poor migrants for whom home is just a notion and not where the heart is.

Migrants tend to be among the workers most hit by economic downturns for several reasons. Migrant labour is often used, as a cyclical buffer and a skill balancer, like other macroeconomic policies aimed at maximising growth and minimising unemployment. From a social and political perspective, in times of economic insecurity, migrants easily become scapegoats to xenophobic sentiments and discrimination. Domestic migrants at all levels, at least have the security of nationhood and federal structures, it is the lower strata of trans-national migrants that suffers social and economic alienation without the safety net of social or governmental support.

However, many migrant workers are not returning home voluntarily. They tried keeping hope in the re-rise of their livelihoods but hope soon became a function of money, as no light could be seen across the tunnel and the voids that awaited them back home. This was the case even when they were offered financial incentives to voluntarily depart. Simply put, they were just choosing the bad option from the worse. As aircrafts return from all over the world, naval ships make Samudra Setu, trains carry interstate transients and the picture of families walking back home, on endless highways, becomes an uncomfortable routine, this ‘flight to safety’ is becoming a parallel pandemic.

This return ‘home’ process broadly has two major impacts; the likelihood of an import of corona virus infections and a major drop in international remittances. Policies and processes will try and offset the virus threat, but the drying up of money inflow will hurt ones who depend on it the most. India gets approximately $80 Billion in remittances, a big chunk of that has already started fading. This financial loss gets further amplified when the out of work migrants fall back on the system that depended largely on their contributions.

So whose problem is this migrant crisis? When there is lesser to go around, a different trait of human psychology comes to fore. Employers have no sales to save jobs, government has less tax to offer welfare and the society that had adopted the comforts of excess, wants to hold on to them. In India, the scale of the issue and the compassion fatigue caused by the over-exposure on all media platforms further worsens the case. We hardly remember the lifeless body of a Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi and the new generation is bereft of the wounds of Partition. Our society might not be at war but the pain of being displaced is the same.

Economic survival is also a fundamental right, more so for the invisible workforce that was such a vital contributor to it. The typical forced migrant breadwinner must find a good job, and quickly, to mitigate his or her family’s plight, and to overcome the poverty, uncertainty, and humiliation. At the same time, new investments occur too slowly or are deterred by a fragile investment climate or by economic instability, which is made even worse by a large inflow of migrants. The lethal effects corona virus on top of this job market mismatch is already severe and might become extreme and persistent. Economic revival being the only hope is the difficult need of the hour.

Since this is an ongoing transition, even when the lockdown opens, there will be migrants; stranded at their place of work, still moving on roads towards home or at their home towns, thus labour shortages will continue and would in turn threaten industries dependent on migrants, particularly agriculture where the crop seasons wait for none. There is also a feel that large distance migration may reduce, as people will be averse on getting stuck in far off places. This will severely impact the revival of the businesses, something we are counting on to offset the crisis. Breaking these circular (or cyclic) dependencies is where the national political will comes into play when at the cost of financial prudence, the government will have to bail out businesses and put money back into the hands of people and encourage spending instead of tilting towards regressive taxation policies.

And when you take focus on the individual who is migrating with his family or alone, maybe on a flight from Gulf or on a train from Mumbai or just walking on a highway in UP, the only thing that matters is reaching home safe. The other battles seem distant as the journey converges all socio-economic realms and becomes a humanitarian crisis. This is not something new to us, as migrant labour has seasonally been moving back home during holiday or harvesting times but it was hit by mobility lockdowns. The challenge now is to avoid human loss from this unprecedented and unplanned displacement as well as the disconcerting virus. The more we are able to manage this efficiently, the smaller would be the add-on crisis this movement of humanity brings.

This maybe a big catastrophe for us all, but drawing on ethnographies of poor migrants, there is often a ‘constant prospect’ of crisis woven into their social fabric in contemporary times. When you are neither where you are supposed to be nor where you want to be, the place has no meaning and the streets have no names. When Ralph Waldo Emerson said “Its the not the Destination, It's the journey,” he surely did not have migrants in mind.

Unforgiven 2

Will we ever know where the corona virus came from? Maybe only after it is convenient to be told or someone benefits from it. But we all know the life and livelihood costs of COVID-19 and the graphs that keep showing mirages. The first unforgiven was the spread of this disease through out the world. Its start from China, its race all over the globe and our fear of how long it would speed till the checkered flag. The virus killed humans, brought trade to knees and purged the ‘social’ trait from the ‘social animal’. History will not be kind to the origins of the virus, even if they plan to write it.

After Y2K, the end of the world had become a cliché. But, nothing is a cliché when it's happening to you. We are all swimming in the effects of the virus; collecting evidence has gotten old a few thousand deaths ago. The hope now is to get out of homes and reclaim the world. A few countries have started the opening up and all others are thinking about doing it soon. We too, have released the ‘graduated withdrawal of restrictions’ plan and are praying that the learning curve would be soft on us.

Experts fear that lifting those restrictions could start the process all over again. Since the movement of people caused the spread and the lockdowns merely delayed the peak, their logic appears sound. The second wave looks like the Judgment Day we have delayed, but is inevitable. Emotions aside, resilience and greatness of nations are as good as antibiotics and as we stand today, there is neither a potent vaccine nor an effective cure. The virus is not going anywhere. There are two main ways the virus can make a resurgence as residents emerge from their homes, return to work, take their children to school, and go shopping. First, a small number of residents who were under lockdown could still have the virus when restrictions lift but not know they're sick. Those people could then spread it, starting a new wave of infections. Second, international travellers could bring the virus back into the country and a churn of all this in the domestic sector will cause huge problems of containment till the antidote comes to rescue.

In a noisy democracy like ours, prudence hints towards self-empowerment and care over and above institutionalised programs. Freedom will mean discipline, our own actions of distancing, wearing masks, diligent hygiene and avoidance of the unnecessary will need to become muscle memory with even more added care towards the young and the old. But then these are just words, all of this went for a toss as the liquor vends opened up yesterday. Hysteria aside, people ignored all heed of self-protection advisories as if the wise Obi-Wan Kenobi himself gave them deflector shields when he said “May The 4^th Be With You” (or something like that). Lessons from this opening, compounded by infection results in a few days, might make any reopening a hard choice and a very slow eventuality.

We have been suffering the worst from the first sin and it should be a crime to throw away the advantages of relaxed restrictions, but it surely will be cruel to contribute to the second wave. It's a rare chance given to us and taking the Blue Pill is not an option. Prioritise life. Take it slow.

PS: Credits to Metallica, Max Payne, Terminator, Star Wars, Churchill and Morpheus.

Creating Hope

40 plus days of social distancing, lock down, isolation, pay cuts, job uncertainty and a continuous bombardment of bad news has made people anxious, to say the least, during this COVID crisis. As we start “Lockdown Season-3”, the talks of relaxation of restrictions, progress in formulation of a vaccine and areas being declared green and orange from red, have given some rays of hope to the masses. It is being felt that better times are round the corner.

Hope is a very strong emotion. It’s link to our survival instinct makes hope an intangible imperative for us flourishing as a race. Every prognosis brings out how this current crunch will change our normal, forcing changes in habits, expectations and recalibrating our individual ecosystems. But this prediction game is easy as the analysts keep coming up with broadband predictions covering all conceivable options and just waiting to say, “I told you so”. However, life being analog has to be lived till the new normal becomes normal.

This transition thus becomes the phase where neither possibility nor probability offers comfort as we sometimes mistake aggressive actions for effective actions. Engaging a large population in such times, while balancing the social and economic variables of individuals, collectives and societies, presents problems beyond the realm of mathematical statistics. For people, life is about value. During adversity, people start attaching more value to the innate while, trying their best to hold on to the notion of life they had. Yet, the beauty of humans is, that they themselves are the most vital link in the entire value chain. Thus, engaging and leveraging this human infinity becomes pivot in defining the strength of our resilience.

There is no recommended ratio of words vs actions that offers balance to leadership. However, plans advertised without the backup of capacity reduce Statesmanship to Statement-ship, eroding faith and seeding fear. While we push through this pandemic, assurances are being sought by one and all. We all want to be told what is being done and what is likely to happen, as it enables us to graduate from symbolic interactionism to constructivism, thus cognitively designing our reality. A simple example would be the headlines, “Lockdown Extended for Two Weeks” versus “Graduated Relaxation of Restrictions Announced.” Both are just word plays on how the next two weeks will be tackled by the government, but the hint of uncertainty against a feel of relief is what makes the two statements vastly different as planning triggers.

Crisis evolution is by large, binary in nature: evolve or perish. As the current situation starts making more sense, it is evident that we need to leverage our strengths and enhance capacities else the hanging fruit will be plucked by someone else who is more ready and flexible. More than 50 major businesses have, till now, decided to ditch China and relocate, but they are mostly moving to other South East Asian countries like Vietnam instead of India and with our own manufacturing still under lockdown, European retailers are threatening to shift orders to the Chinese manufacturers if the Indian factories do not deliver in time.To top this off is the crash in our domestic demand that has made restarting of manufacturing units uncertain, apart from difficult, due to broken supply chains and internally displaced labour.

Feel-good information may be a part in the creation of hope, but excessive symbolism sometimes indicates bankruptcy of ideas. People will like to hear and read about how the huge logistics of the nation rebooting will be tackled, how the markets will be opened, how the flights and trains will resume and once that happens how will the second wave of infections be managed. Unfortunately, all these being politically difficult decisions and the umbrella awareness being fluid in nature, incremental decision-making and addendums are the only realistic bet.

Despite the many limitations, there are many emerging opportunities that we can take and all is not lost. Oil being cheaper, we can try and stock up. With companies having tremendous tech and skill resources threatened due to the global crash (eg Bombardier), we can push stakes in a few to buy the next gen solutions for our own self, at least. People being confined to houses, improvement of existing infrastructure can be attempted which would have otherwise caused great discomfort and warehousing of grains can be optimised for reducing the unforgivable wastage caused by rains. Just a few of the vast canvas of examples up for grabs.

Unfortunately, at the same time, cross border terrorism and its costs have also continued as the western neighbor leases the future of its citizens to Yuan. I compare this insurgency with the COVID pandemic because they both continue to exist today and every pre-mature celebration has ended up with a sad twist leaving the suffering to continue. Fighting ideology with bullets, our triumph over the terrorists has remained occasional and temporary, but our inability to create a secure space has become permanent. We might seek gratification with feel-good news but what we truly need is actual effort and balanced wisdom. Let us use our human strive as a catalyst for change instead of fodder for fire.