Operation successful. Patient dead.

In one of our English textbooks at school, there was a story of "The Tiger King", a #satire by Ramaswamy Aiyer Krishnamurthy aka Kalki, which ended with this seemingly incongruous line: "The operation was successful. The Maharaja is dead."

It was the revenge of the 100th tiger the Maharaja (almost) killed (but who was actually killed later by his people to convince him that it was his shot that got the magnificent animal), as was predicted by an astrologer when the King was a child, which was the root of his fears and the reason why the Maharaja went on a hunting spree to kill tigers, sometimes at great expense and risk to him, his subjects, and his kingdom.

Sounds familiar? Well, you can read the story here, or you can watch it as it unfolds live on your TV screens every day in the world today.

We seem to reacting to this with the assumption that this is the only virus out there, that this will end if only we "break the chain" (whatever that means), that it won't be triggered once again at the slightest contact between any one infected person left alive and the hundreds of people that human will undoubtedly meet once this is lifted, and that the economy (a) can take care of itself, and (b) is less important to the very people we want to save. All of these assumptions are based on bad understanding or bad data, and the effects these erroneous decisions that flow out of this will have will be long-lasting and extremely harmful to not just the most vulnerable people in our society, but even those that are several rungs above them in the socio-economic pyramid.

The world, I predict, will change for sure #postCovid19, but not inspite of our best efforts. It will change because of our well-meaning but completely ill-thought-out actions that we allowed our leaders to take out of fear (fuelled by the media and by the leaders themselves), and because we believed in them, and they took because that was the easiest way out...or way in, depending on where you stand. The problem will begin when they start groping about with the same ignorance for the way out, the exit, the soft landing. And that, my friends, will be the unravelling of this entire charade, in my opinion.

At the end of this #pandemic, we will probably have our politicians come out of the operation theatre with something similar, "Operation successful. Patient did not die from #Covid19. Patient died due to fear, dehydration, starvation, unemployment, depression, loneliness, and stupidity."