Showing posts with label Wuhan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wuhan. Show all posts

Monday, 14 February 2022

The unseen non-medical effects of lockdown?

Unpaused (Anthology of 5 episodes, Hindi; 2020)
Unpaused: Naya Safar (5 episodes; 2021)


As the numbers of Omicron variant cases continue to rise, allegedly after a large congregation of unvaccinated pilgrims made it all the way to the Holy Land, now is an opportune time to reminisce the good old days when a virus from Wuhan labs jumped ship and affected humans. It is mind-boggling to fathom how much this pandemic had jolted the core of our existence.

It goes without saying that the pandemic has affected everyone in so many ways. Economically, it affected all, predominantly those on the lower rung of the food chain. Interestingly, the ten of the richest globally has doubled their wealth at the end of the second wave.

Inconspicuously, Covid infection started as a concern only for the affluent and frequent flyers as they picked the bug after globetrotting. The poor were not so concerned then. Soon, the tables turned. Living in a restricted living space and close proximity between family members made the poor more vulnerable and even outcasts when society started combating the disease.

What is often forgotten in the equation is the psychological component of this whole calamity. In years to come, the full extent of the post-traumatic stress of being cooped indoors, studying online for two years, non-attendance of familial functions and spending hours gazing at a blue screen will come to the fore.

These two anthology types of miniseries explore many of the stresses people endured in the past two waves of the pandemic. Many of the stories are so surreal and plucks the strings of the viewers' hearts. We stop complaining about our shoes when we see someone with no legs.

In the first season of Unpaused, the episode that piqued my interest was the one called 'Glitch'. In a futuristic universe, Covid has mutated so many times. The world is divided into two types of people - the 'hypos', short for hypochondriacs who simply live an isolated life with a morbid phobia of coming in contact with humans and the 'warriors', who are scientists and frontliners who fight hard to annihilate the virus. It is no more Covid-19; it is Covid-30 in the year 2030. Years of isolation have drained people of interactive social skills, and they have to depend on computer programmes to hook people up. A glitch in the systems meets two people' virtually' in a chat room. The problem is that one is a hypo and the other a warrior. The warrior in real life is a mute scientist. After an initial stormy hook-up, love transcended all differences. The hypo learns sign language and overcomes his germophobia tendencies.

In the second season, two of its episodes were, I thought they were very well made. In 'War Room', a quiet school teacher was assigned to help out at a hotline centre to arrange ICU beds for Covid patients. She carries the burden of the death of her teenage son on her sleeve. He had apparently committed suicide. Legal proceedings were ongoing as she tried to sue his college principal for negligence as the school did not arrange for medical assistance in time to save him. Despite the overhanging sorrow over her head, the teacher hoped to serve society to pay her dues. Fate plays its twisted humour when she gets into a position to deny a bed for the said principal when his son called in requesting an ICU bed. The rest of the story is about she deals with this moral dilemma.

'Vaikunth' (Heaven) is another exciting episode with a compelling storyline. A crematorium worker has his hands full as the number of Covid deaths increases during the second wave. He is a single parent, and his father is admitted for Covid. He also has a young son whom he is trying desperately to educate. He thinks he is doing excellent service to mankind by diligently handling the extra bodies to cremate. Unfortunately, his landlord and his neighbours believe otherwise. They are not comfortable with his close link to Covid, attending to Covid death and his father being Covid+. Nobody is willing to care for his son temporarily; hence, both stay on the crematorium premises. Meanwhile, there is no avenue available to find out whatever happened to his father. He is a 'frontliner', braving himself against the unseen enemy, but nobody actually gives him a second look. 

There are more things to appreciate than the story itself in these two and other episodes. The subtle inclusion of motifs (like the fire in Vaikunth - fire to cremate at the end of life, fire to light the stove for sustenance, and fire to light a cigarette to enjoy life) and the excellent cinematography. The episode ends with a poetic message about how the ashes from the burnt bodies are used to fertilise the rice fields to germinate new seeds, completing the circle of life from ashes to ashes. 

Hope is the thing with feathers/ That perches in the soul…." Emily Dickinson

Sunday, 2 January 2022

It is only natural to move forward!

May 4th Movement
Tiananmen Gathering 1919;
a turning point in Chinese history
.
It seems biological warfare does not just mean sending anthrax spores or releasing serine gas at a railway station. It had evolved to something quite specific to the intended victim.

Like in the latest James Bond offering, like how Spectre had perfected the art of individualising weapons against its enemies, some conspiracy theorists believe that the emergence of the Wuhan virus is one step closer towards this end. The constant mutation of this RNA virus at such neck-breaking speed all through alpha to zeta variants in a matter of years further cements their arguments.

When the western world decided that facial recognition software does not work well, in came the Chinese with a technologically functional system so advanced that it puts shame on the Western stereotype that 'all Chinese faces look alike'!

The condescending look of the world (read West) probably reached its zenith after the 1919 Versailles Treaty. After dismantling the Chinese dynasty and fighting an uphill battle with opium addiction, the Treaty sealed the last nail on the coffin at a time of turmoil. Even though China was aligned with the Allied Forces, she got a raw deal. She had the area around the Shandong peninsula, German holdings before WW1, assigned to their mortal enemy, Japan.

The time after that was of great upheaval; the age-old Confucius styled civil service entrance examinations were revamped, the May Fourth Movement, political and cultural revolution and finally Communist China came to being to restore China's past glory. At every turn, the world viewed China hawkishly as a despotic, third-world godless country that does not respect human dignity.

So when the world foolishly thought that China could be cajoled to perform the Western world's menial and laborious chores, China jumped at the opportunity. Slowly, on the sly, it improved its human capital.


Zheng Ho, the 1400s

After a century of slumber, the dragon has awoken. The ugly duckling has turned into a swan. Suddenly their brilliance shines the world over. If the club of space-venturing countries thought going to the moon was unproductive, China shocked everyone by approaching the moon from the dark side.

The fear of 'Yellow Peril' is ignited once again by people who tend to be negatively affected by the rise of the sleeping dragon. Will they repeat their previous feat in the early 15th century when their fleets explored the four corners of the world, including the New World, almost a good 90-over years before the European looters?

Wednesday, 19 May 2021

Beware what you catch!

I can hear her words still reverberating in my ears like she said it yesterday. To catch a  big fish, always put a small fry on the hook. All through my childhood, this is the mantra that Amma preached upon us. She was unapologetic about her views about the nuns in the convent school that my sisters went to. Even though she was the one who insisted that my sisters should go to a missionary school, she was always sceptical about their true intentions. She told my sisters to learn what the teachers taught but not what the nuns preached. She was clear about that. In her mind, the school gave good education, for the other stuff, thank you very much.

Whenever someone offers you a handout, be wary. Amma would always remind us that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Everything carries a piece of baggage. In simple terms, we grew up distrusting altruistic intention, minding only for ourselves. Maybe, these teachings helped us to pull ourselves by our bootstraps to greater heights.

As we matured and our inner eyes opened, we thought maybe the human race survive all this while because of our altruistic acts, not just each individual's zest to survive. The strong had to hold out a helping hand to guide the weak. For that, we have charity bodies, NGOs and religious institutions.  

All that Amma had said came echoing back to me after so many decades when Bill Gates, the once-richest man in the world, announced that he was donating half of his property to charity and was sacrificing his life and soul in solving Africa's food and health problems once and all.  

Soon enough, the truth was revealed. At the heights of the Wuhan virus pandemic and the desperate dearth of vaccines in everybody mind, someone suggested that the patency for vaccines should be lifted. It was thought more vaccine makers can increase production to make it available to the masses, the rich and poor alike. But, much to everybody's surprise, Mr Gates opposed the idea citing fear of a drop in the quality of vaccines produced. In my eyes, it sounds like a drop in income rather than quality control.

Even closer to home, our leaders are not at all interested in getting all its citizens vaccinated. The tussle is not in procuring vaccines, but which brand to use, whose proxy companies would get the lion's share of the bargain and what is it for them. Nobody is bothered about the lay people's welfare. Even individual states which procure vaccines via donations are restricted from using, citing licencing and legal mumbo jumbo as the issue. Again, the bottom line is ringgits and sens. If their intentions are so clear, are they worried? No, they are so thick-skinned that nothing can hurt them. Come next election, they would create another ruckus to garner sympathy votes.


Wednesday, 26 February 2020

Mere coincidences?

The Eyes of Darkness (1981)
Author: Dean Koontz (aka Leigh Nichols)


This book has been making its rounds recently after the current outbreak of the feared novel coronavirus Covid19. The excitement (paranoia) grew as it was mentioned that the said virus was developed as an experimental bug in a research facility in Wuhan, China. On top of that, the virus in the book is reported to have a 100% mortality rate. The hysteria reached a feverish pitch as more pictures allegedly coming out clandestinely from there dropping like flies after contracting the disease.


This story is a simple one narrating the tale of a grieving divorced young mother. She lost her son during his school trip accident. Even a year after his demise, she had not really got over him. She kept seeing him around town. Many unexplained events made her conclude that her child was somehow trying to contact her telepathically or via telekinesis. 

With her newfound love interest and a lot of help from her gifted son who is still alive in captivity,(surprise!), they discover a secret government facility and their secret experimentation with a killer bug.

There are some interesting facts about this book. The writer, a prolific one, wrote under many pseudonyms - Leigh Nichols when he wrote this 1981 novel. In the original edition, the biological agent was produced in a Russian lab, named 'Gorki-400', probably after Gorky Park in Moscow. 

There was a reprint in 2008. By the time the Iron Curtain had fallen, and it was not thrilling to put Russians as the villains. The events surrounding 1989 Tiananmen Square made China the perfect bogeyman. Hence, 'Gorki-400' became 'Wuhan-400'. The rogue scientist Ilya Poparipov became Li Chen.

People are questioning whether the mention of a biological weapon arising from Wuhan from a nearby laboratory is mere coincidence or is there something more that is present in this interplay?

There have been many instances when such a fluke event happened. Think 1912 Titanic and its disastrous maiden voyage and you have 1898 Morgan Robertson's novel 'The Wreck of Futility', renamed 'The Wreck of Titan'. The book chillingly describes many striking similarities between the ill-fated ocean liner, Titanic and the ship in the novel, Futility (a disastrous name, if you ask me). Of course, as conspiracy theorists would go, the company that managed the Titanic was running at a loss and got their inspiration to make insurance claims from this book.

Then there are Jules Verne's many classic novels - '20,000 leagues under the sea', 'Around the world in 80 days', 'In the year 2889' and 'From Earth to the Moon'. This Father of Fiction sitting in the cosy chair of the late 19th century could conjure up devices that are of highly complexed inventions. Captain Nemo had his electric submarine, which was a reality more than a century later. His other novels spoke of helicopters, hologram, newscasts, video conferencing and space suits. Can you imagine, he even mentioned solar sails for interplanetary travels, which are only theoretically possible even in this age and time?

Are these people clairvoyants? Are they endowed with some kind of extra-sensory precognition that can tap events from an alternate universe or foresee events of the future? Perhaps, like Ramanujan, mathematician extraordinaire, they just attuned their brain wavelengths to the correct frequency to pick up information from the Master Intellect that controls every nook and corner of the Universe. 

Do their works form a template for other great minds to work on a prototype or perhaps improve their ideas? 

Did Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek implant the idea of creating such designs like iPad, Flip phone, BlueTooth headset, command-obeying Siri, Flat TV panels, communication badges, hand-held Universal translators or Google Glass? Or was it is just part of human's general technological evolution? If that is the case, in no time, teleportation will be a reality. 

Hey, what do you know, successful teleportations of information on computer chips have been reported through quantum entanglement in laboratory conditions.



“Be afraid. Be very afraid.”*