May seem to contain tongue-in-cheek references to people living or dead, but of course that must be a mirage projected by your mischievous or sensitive mind, as this writer never intended to get in trouble for her (inoffensive) thoughts on real life.
Contains local Indian references, coincidentally connected to real life - you may follow the links to study the coincidences in more detail. For people unfamiliar with Hindi, translations provided in chronological order at the end of the piece.
You’d think math was the one science free from politics.
Well, think again.
The last few months have been a pandemonium, underlined by a pandemic. I’m living in my parents’ basement (no, literally), and working out of a garage office (sort of) while building a complex system dynamics model that sought to provide method to the madness, by providing guidance on policy and health to the people who have our best interest at heart. Little did I know what lay in wait, as I went from Zoom to Teams in a quest to get to the real decision makers, in this case, HH and His government, to take note. Well, HH’s HQ has a strange way of working, one that still eludes my common citizen brain. Note I don’t call it an Aam Aadmi (1) brain at all, lest I invite the ire of the HH.
These aforementioned few months have been a grand celebration of what it means to be Indian. We, in multitudes, went back home to our fathers, mothers, fathers-in-laws, mothers-in-laws, brothers, sisters, grandparents, and in short to the larger family - in a great testimony of our love for the great Indian ‘parivaar’ (2), in the face of a treacherous disease that has called for increased ‘social distancing’ and ‘self-isolation’. As the western world coined these ridiculous phrases and repeated them over and over and over, to the exasperation of those of us that get our media fill from their non-saas-bahu (3) world, we showed the world how we are a people that choose to stand hand in hand in times of crisis.
What underlined this need for solidarity was a very interesting turn of events which made us all atmanirbhar (4). At the stroke of the midnight hour, standing in front of a camera and a mic, HH was about to change the lives of his subjects people for the second time in His majestic tenure. He gushed as He found comfort in front of two of His three favourite things in the world (the third being that lovely side-profile photo plastered all over the country). He had played God once before, and the love and faith of the nation made Him chuckle. The Sacred Games meme ‘Kabhi Kabhi lagta hai ki Apun ich Bhagwan hai’ (5) that best friend#1 had just sent stared at Him on the phone as HH went to get His nose powdered. Unable to contain a smile, HH concentrated on a discourteous interview He’d had with a certain Thapar a decade ago, to arouse His better emotions and wipe the idiotic grin off His face. It was time for the national address.
In no time after the HH’s announcement, as the maids went underground, out came the magical wipers & cleaners we had bought off Network Shopping, bewitched by their capacity to clean grease, mud and even blood stains. Granted we had never dealt with grease and mud before. But what with cute kids telling us ‘Daag achhe hain’ (6) over the last few years, the Indian middle class had explored a change in lifestyle, and become more accepting of muck. This had become a Harvard case study for political science students to understand societal change and acceptance, and for the MBA students to learn how to use this to sell things. The Unilevers laughed their way to the bank as we bought stronger cleaning agents that could enable us to get away with murder. But I digress… I apologise, I have real hard time focusing on what the nation wants to know, just like our TV channels.
Anyway, a real division of labour had set stage in our households - with shifts and routines for jhaadu, pochha, (7) washing dishes & clothes and cooking food. In my house, we would start every day at 6 a.m. The moment my dad picked up the broom, my mom would start seeing cobwebs and dust everywhere. What took the maid 30 minutes became a 2 hour ritual, framed as a competition for “Cleaner of the week” across our day-wise shifts. After all, my mother had also picked up some tricks from my management books. All this cleaning was becoming a truly national experience, and I realised this while ‘housepartying’ with a few friends on the latest viral app. Our 45 minute party was dedicated to finding out who had the best pochha and who was still stuck with a hand job. No wonder, the Aam Aadmi’s fascination with jhadoo. We’d finally struck upon a subject that united India.
Amidst all this cleaning and scrubbing, and the virus notwithstanding, HH had to make sure we were also enjoying ourselves - so he invited us out to demonstrate our clean bartan (8) with a thali (8) banging competition with our neighbours. Would we not comply with HH and show him how our cleaning skills had improved? Outrageous. In a true show of solidarity, we all took our best bartan to the streets, dancing and hugging our neighbours in our shared joy, hoping for a tear of pride for our devotion to HH’s word in his next broadcast. You see, this was all His masterplan to keep us stress-free; the government had an ace up its sleeve as they were anyway going to kill the virus by giving it 14 days of sunbathing.
But sometimes, 14 days is not enough. We extended our houseparties by a couple more weeks, as we had anyway forgotten what days or weeks really looked like. If not for the serious people on TV looking even more serious as they talked about HH’s masterstroke, wearing blazers and jackets in the sweltering summer, we wouldn’t even have noticed if the lockdown never ended. As millions of our brethren took arduous journeys home, we happily donated our hard saved money to the coffers that told us that HH Cares. We felt pride in doing our duty, as we trusted our dear leader to do His. There were idiots in the idiot box who also kept us busy with some very important blame and shame games. Even though we weren’t going to work or school or college or salons to gossip, we always knew who to hate.
Meanwhile, the scientist in me had been working with some other scientists and academicians on improving the all-important model that could advise the corridors of power on the propagation of the treacherous virus. By now, I had perfected my pronunciation of the trending word of the year ‘epidemiology’, and had confused multiple babus (9) with concepts like the ‘R-noughts’ and the ‘contact rates’. But I was always a step behind. In a few days after the sunbathing plan went kaput, HH’s Minister for our well-being suggested this will all be over in the next month. I reached out to friends at the Ministry, who further shared insider scoop that our dear leader has found a vaccine which was to reach us in a month - I was unaware that the pandemic was almost over! I was still trying to hit the panic button through my science, while the babus had figured out the endgame already!
Like the law of diminishing returns, as the case numbers rose, our precautions declined. No more isolation of groceries, we could wash those with the virus killing sprays. No more home cooking, we could order in and dispose off the single-use plastics. Contactless became a buzzword, though the physics of it remained a mystery to me. Whatever the virus tried to label dangerous, capitalism labelled ‘sanitized’. It seemed like all business placed my ‘safety first’, as long as it meant I continued to be a customer. All this while, HH assuaged us about the situation being under control. The conflict between what I saw and what I understood had pushed me into turmoil. I no longer knew what was true.
As I went back to the drawing board, my model continued showing grave disparity to the prevailing narrative. It sputtered, with a great degree of embarrassment, that this is just the beginning and we are in for a long haul before I shut it up again. I kept receiving invites to conduct digital ‘events’ with people who still trusted my word, and they wanted to know if my findings corroborated with HH’s. What could I say? I merely had a model! I was suddenly finding myself trapped in a crime of doublethinking.
—
It took me some time, but that’s the cost of faith. I looked at my model’s results one last time. Then, as I looked at that enormous portrait of HH, His beautiful all-knowing smile revealed that it hid secrets I could never fathom. I knew it then: I’d been unfaithful; there’s no need for fear mongering when all’s in control. Even if the babus didn’t know, He knew. He had a secret plan. As the exhaustion from the Trials of talking science to babus took over me, I stared into those eyes, knowing that all will be well. It was all right, everything was all right, I finally found truth in faith.
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Irrelevant translations for the Optimistic Soul
Aam Aadmi: Common man; also a local / aspiring national political party headquartered in New Delhi.
Parivaar: Family (preferably large).
Saas-bahu: Colloquial reference to mother-in-laws and daughter-in-laws. Their otherworldly experiences are captured in painstaking detail on Indian telly.
Atmanirbhar: Self-reliant, like the Indian propensity to do all our housework without any help from low-wage labourers (God forbid!).
Kabhi Kabhi lagta hai ki Apun ich Bhagwan hai - Famous dialogue from a Netflix series, Sacred Games. It can be translated as, ‘Sometimes it seems it is I who is God.’
Daag achhe hain: Stains are good. A famous series of advertisements by one of India’s top-selling detergent companies, Surf Excel (owned by Unilever).
Jhaadu, pochha: Sweeping and mopping tools in Indian parlance.
Bartan, Thali: Utensils like plates, bowls, etc.
Babus: Colloquial reference to political bureaucrats. Think the myriad officials in Franz Kafka’s The Trial.