Making it a fair game

Inequalities are inevitable. But, without a sense of justice, inequalities help bolster insatiable greed and malice. Every human calamity then turns into an opportunity to create a paradigm that can provide new earnings in the garb of human good. The Covid-19 pandemic is the latest addition to this list of opportunities. I have always held that it is far more easy to persuade a clever intern to bunk office than to sit late and slog it out. It is just the way humans are hard wired—to look for the easiest way up. In India, the unfeeling and uncaring, overwhelmed government run facilities turn patients away without a qualm, while the private hospitals have a field day charging Covid positive patients whopping amounts in the name of quality care and a multitude of PPEs. To decongest—not only in medical parlance, but also in sociological terms was a suggestion that hundreds of well-honed specialists, planners and epidemiologists offered from the initiation of the ‘sampoorna’ lockdown from March 25, 2020. Yet, India’s scores of industrialists sat back as its workers lugged through highways in the sub-continent’s searing summer heat. All those who can read and write, now have newer and shinier thinking machines in addition to the airconditioner-cum-purifier—connected to the all-in-all internet. Where do the humongous proceeds, harvested every second through IT driven services from a multitude of human populace go? To a very few I am told. As the rich get richer, I often wonder if things could have been any different. If only we could delink the novel-slavery of the fettered political class—free them from the shackles of painful fund-sourcing for expensive elections. Could we have fewer inequalities and better governance then? Could we have an unbiased and just system of access then? Wishful thinking maybe, but who knows?

Happy reading.