A Friend’s Comments Come True

In March 2017, I received an email from a former Citibank colleague about a group visit to India which he cancelled. I was shocked for his reason, but unfortunately four and a half years later, he has proven right.

When I joined Citibank in February 1975 there was a Hong Kong Chinese colleague with whom I got along. We also attended a three-month training course in Manila in 1978. After a few years he moved to the US and about ten years later he moved back. We kept in touch sporadically prior to our moving back to Delhi in late 2005.

I was therefore pleasantly surprised to receive an email from him in November 2016, saying that a group of about 15 friends wanted to visit India and if I could introduce him to a travel agent who could take care of their travel plans. I introduced him to the agent whom we used.

A couple of months went by and I did not hear anything. I checked with my travel agent. With an embarrassed tone, she said that after two months of correspondence, he had cancelled their plans with a strange email. I asked her to send it to me.  She did and it read as follows:

“My group is very concerned about hygiene and health hazard to India and decided to put the tour on hold pending further deliberation. The concerns include “superbug” that according to a recent Bloomberg article 9 out of 10 foreigners got infected with superbug after visiting India. The other is the existence of feces and dead corpses in different places.”

I was absolutely livid and wrote to him that about a year ago my son, Simran got married and that we had seventy to eighty visitors from overseas, some of whom travelled all over India. None of them had fallen ill, other than the odd case of a stomach bug.  Also, that never in my life had I seen dead bodies lying on the streets. I also told him that he was being ridiculous and that the previous year India had almost nine million tourists and using his numbers at least eight million should have come down with the superbug. I quoted him a Bloomberg article which confirmed “That finding and other recent studies show antimicrobial resistance is a growing worldwide problem, with an especially high incidence in countries in South Asia, Southeast Asia, China, and some areas in southern Europe, such as Greece “said Lindsay Grayson, head of infectious diseases at the Austin Hospital in Melbourne ". He responded with a conciliatory message.

Now with the state the country is in I feel that I should write to him and say that perhaps he was right after all. All of you must have read enough and seen photographs of patients queuing up outside hospitals due to a lack of beds and erratic oxygen supplies and funeral pyres being light in parks. In the meantime, the politicians are playing politics about the supply of oxygen. State governments allowing elections, religious festivals and the list goes on.

 

The local politicians in the meantime talk about the virus being cured by drinking cow urine or rubbing cow dung. A couple of extreme videos circulating on social video show a group of men in Karnataka dipping in pool of cow dung shouting Jai Mata or crowds running through the streets with the air full of cow dung being showered on them.

A few months ago, we were strutting around the globe saying that we had slayed the virus beast and we were the world’s pharmacy. During this period specialists in India were warning the government of the impending tsunami, but they were ignored. We were trying to outdo China by handing out millions of vaccines doses to other countries. While all other countries around the world were placing orders of hundreds of millions of doses, we placed our first order in January 2021 for a relatively modest amount.

I am reminded of the sixties when we were dependent on the world for food grain and we were pitied. The US PL 480 together with the Green Revolution bailed us out. Now we have the Indian Air Force planes flying in oxygen plants “donated "by all the major developed nations to bail out the “super power”. Our credibility has been shattered.  To add salt to the wound, the Government is continuing to spend thousands of crores to build temples and government buildings. UP with its usual sense of priority, has set up help desks which can be approached by gaushalas or to deal with sick cows.

The population in the meantime is trying to do its best to manage the situation. The Residents Welfare Associations have organized vaccine camps, set up medical rooms with oxygen tanks and staffed by nurses. Their web sites act as resource centers for medicines, hospital beds, plasma and doctor contacts. Just seeing it at close quarters within our own apartment complex, it is amazing, heartening and joyful to see that the spirit of humanity is alive and willing to help out each other, providing leads, sourcing oxygen tanks, donating blood or plasma.

The party sycophants of course continue to praise the great job the government is doing and make other inane comments. One politician commenting on the oxygen shortage said that “the hospitals should use the oxygen judiciously and follow the guide lines “. The doctors at the hospitals are all mystified as to how to do that?  What else can I say?