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We’re wasting a lot of money on the Western medical system, money that Nepal cannot afford.

Let’s think about the enormous costs that is going into Covid-testing. While testing is promoted as the most sensible way to go about defeating this pandemic, there are hidden costs. A pharmacist in my neighborhood told me large numbers of people had tested positive, but nobody had symptoms, including an elderly man on dialysis. “Everything is normal,” she said with skepticism. She seemed to hint the coronavirus panic was overblown. She added coronavirus was affecting mental health: a young teenager who had gone to test herself received a positive result, then a negative one at another hospital, then a positive one again at a hospital which refused to release her report, citing regulations, leading her to depression and mental health issues.

I can see people on Twitter anxiously writing about how often they should test. Should they test each week? The problem with the testing paradigm is that you can test negative and walk out, and on the way out of the testing center catch the virus. I’m uncertain how long it takes to incubate, but you could be infectious 24 hours after a negative result.

In such a scenario, does it make sense to emphasize testing? As an Ayurveda advocate, I feel we could better utilize those funds on boosting people’s immunity via time tested supplements like chyawanprash. Instead of massive free Covid tests, why doesn’t the Nepal government spend the same funds to hand out free bottles of vaidyakhana chyawanprash to frontline workers, regardless of age, class or ethnic background? I would love to see how that may turn the tide of the pandemic.

I can also see people on social media asking for medical help, and receiving pat answers citing commonly prescribed antibiotics. This is a viral pandemic, not a bacterial one. This seems to be lost on the people who reach for antibiotics like they reach for Hajmola candy.

Besides warning people about the harm of self prescribed antibiotics, the government needs to prepare and distribute a list of time-tested herbal remedies which are low cost and easy to procure locally. Some of these could be as easy as a one rupee tamarind candy, a brand of which I take each time I feel like I’m falling sick. Tamarind (imli) has high Vitamin C content and its seeds are known to prevent pneumonia.

In most people’s minds, however, a one rupee candy won’t do: healing is not healing until you spend 20 lakhs! As someone trained in anthropology, I suspect complex family power dynamics of whose life is more valuable may also be playing into this “fight to get hospitalized” scenario.

I am cognizant of the 1,500-plus deaths, plus the grief and distress people are feeling from coronavirus in Nepal. The emotive nature of the moment can bring feelings of outrage. Especially for the scientifically inclined who see hospitals, big pharma and ventilators as the one and only way to heal people, the dismissal of modern medicine can appear regressive and cruel. But even doctors have been quoted in articles as saying the majority of coronavirus patients will recover without any medical intervention.

Americans are reporting a dramatic range of post-hospitalization symptoms, now known as “long Covid.” We have no idea if those symptoms, including dementia and memory loss, are caused by drugs. People also have kidney and liver damage. There has been no comparative research of those who chose Ayurveda over those who went to the hospitals. If such a study were done, we could see if those who stayed out of hospitals have those symptoms. That most reliable newsgathering agency of the world, the BBC, has reported as fact that dementia and memory loss are caused by coronavirus. There is, however, no research to prove this is the case.

I recently heard of a family friend who is seriously ill with the coronavirus. What I know about him, besides the fact that he is a simple—humble man who’s lived an austere and disciplined life—is that he has several family members who are engaged in the medical profession. I have no doubt he received the best western medical care, including oxygen. To my mind, this has become a death knell. Someone who may have been cured by traditional remedies may never recover from this virus due to the debilitating effects of modern medication.

Health discourse is structured to silence those who seek to question the hegemonic narrative of Western scientific superiority. There is no room for those who question the efficacy of this system. Do we need billions of dosages of expensive vaccines frozen at minus 80 degrees and which need freezers that don’t exist in most parts of the world? Who are the scientists creating these nonsensical, expensive products after vacuuming up billions of dollars that should have gone to sensible, low cost healing?

Doctors have saved my life after the earthquake. I am deeply grateful to them for patching me back together. But that doesn’t stop me from speaking the truth about this pandemic: we must save our hospital beds for accidents, surgeries and childbirths, not overburden the hospital system, and treat coronavirus patients at home with the herbal, Ayurvedic and Amchi medicines we have been given by our ancient cultures and traditions.

These are the author’s personal views

Ayurveda and traditional healing traditions from around the world are increasingly being dismissed as “pseudo-science”. The justification for this condescension? “Herbs haven’t gone though clinical trials.”

This argument is lazy. You can find medical research literature of herbs like gurjo, hibiscus, and timmur in the Western scientific tradition, archived online. I read these research articles via the US National Library of Medicine at the National Institute of Health. People do not bother to read them, even though they are only a click away.

The Kathmandu Post recently ran an article about Kathmandu traffic police planting Tinospora cordifolia or gurjo at the Tinkune Park. Gurjo is thought to prevent coronavirus. Traffic police officials, among our most vulnerable frontline workers, were grateful to have this healing herb.

This article called it an “untested herb”. There are over 300 scientific research articles about the herb and its usages, including for osteoarthritis to HIV/AIDS on the web, from respectable researchers. The fact the herb has been used by many ethnic groups in Nepal, creating a pool of “pharma testers” who’ve gone through clinical trials of its efficacy for hundreds if not thousands of years, seems lost on Western-educated people flaunting their infallible modern credentials.

I have written articles mentioning the medicinal value of timmur (Sichuan pepper). Trekking in Langtang in 2005, I came down with a severe headache as I was ascending to Kenjin Gompa. My friends suggested I descend. My headache was debilitating. I could see why people died from lack of oxygen to their brain. In Langtang, villages told me of the local remedy for altitude sickness: chewing timmur, and drinking lots of garlic soup. I may have taken a tablet of Western medicine as well. My pounding headache disappeared only the next morning. I was able to go up to the monastery and admire the cheese factory and the yak herders.

As an undergraduate at Brown University, I was hired by Professor Phil Lieberman to analyze speech of air-traffic controllers, looking at audio waveforms on a computer. Lieberman was researching speech, and if it could show how tired people had become and thereby predict aircraft accidents. In 2004, Lieberman sent students to track mountaineers climbing without oxygen. He wanted to see if there was a link between oxygen deprivation, speech impairment, and brain damage. I reported on this story. I knew that oxygen levels were important and could affect the body’s physiological functioning.

When the coronavirus epidemic was a few months old, observers (including me) started to have doubts about the efficacy of ventilators. Publications reported that doctors themselves were baffled. Although their oxygen levels were dropping through the floor, patients were sitting up, speaking, and talking. The doctors concluded that the symptoms were more akin to altitude sickness, and that they should stop using only mechanical indicators to calculate O2 levels, since pumping people full of oxygen could cause more harm than good.

When I wrote about timmur acting as a natural “ventilator” that pumps oxygen into people’s brains, I was bringing the strands of my life and education together. To my Twitter critics accusing me of “pseudo-science,” this ethnographic lived experience may have been lost.

I had never had hibiscus tea before I went to Bali in 2009. There, a wonderful woman called Janet O’Neefe organizes the Ubud Readers and Writers Festival, and I was one of the invited speakers. After the festival, I took a cooking class via her Casa Luna Cooking School. A jovial man led the session. The other dishes were usual Asian fare, but hibiscus tea stayed in my mind. With a flourish, the instructor took out the pistil and added bright red petals to boiling water. Then he added a dash of lime, turning purple wilted petals into a pink drink. It looked like a magic trick.

I drank this tea because it was refreshing. Only later did I realize its medicinal properties. When I have debilitating menstrual cramps, I drink hibiscus tea and am operational within half hour. As I researched online, I realized this botanical treasure is an ancient ayurvedic medicine. Rudrapushpam is deeply revered and has many usages. Hibiscus had the highest anti-viral effect on the avian flu virus in a research comparing different teas. People mistakenly think antibiotics will heal coronavirus. But what we need are anti-virals, not antibiotics which kill bacteria.

We already have powerful medicines that are stronger than any dubious Big Pharma drug. People infected with the coronavirus in the West die of blood clots. In Nepal, we eat turmeric daily—turmeric is a blood thinner. Hibiscus tea, chyawanprash, timmur, and other herbs, taken in moderate and in correct dose, don’t harm the kidney or liver. Hibiscus is available for free to all in the Indian subcontinent.

On Twitter, Baburam Bhattarai called for free hospitalization of coronavirus patients. This sounds like a responsible activist call, although Bhattarai was last seen infecting large Tarai crowds in an irresponsible vote-gathering endeavor. If government pays hospitals, there is a big chance people will be given unnecessary treatments that damage their lungs, livers, kidneys, and brains. Americans report a dramatic range of post-hospitalization symptoms, most likely caused by drugs and treatments.

It may be more responsible to fund district-wise ayurvedic, amchi and indigenous medicine production, deliver herbal medicine right to people’s doors, and provide care to those who need help at home.

The views are personal

The US, considered the richest economy in the world, has the highest rates of coronavirus deaths. At current count, they have lost over 220K people. Most poor countries in the Third World have seen minimal deaths in comparison. Why, we must ask?

Rwanda, for instance, seems to have adopted very good public health measures. Their air flights are still operational. People are taking precautions and safety measures which make travel safe and easy to monitor possibly infectious individuals.

In the US, by comparison, even masks are a major issue. People throw hysterical fits when asked to leave a store if they don’t have a mask on. There are videos of people lying and saying they have a medical condition in order to get an exemption. The tantrums of Americans laid bare their political stupidities. This is a key reason for high infections and deaths, but not the only one.

There appears to be a correlation between large sums paid to US hospitals for patients on ventilators, and subsequent deaths. According to documentary “Plandemic”, featuring Judy Mikovits (instantly dismissed by US media and health administration as a tinhat conspiracy theorist and a nut), hospitals get large sums for patients who are intubated and ventilated. This encourages doctors to do this procedure even when it is unnecessary, leading to coma and then death. This appears to be a major cause of mass deaths in the US.

Remdesivir, which can cause long-term kidney and liver damage, appears to be another reason. “EU Regulator Probes Possible Kidney Damage From Virus Drug,” reported AFP on 2 October 2020. “A combination of generic drugs appears to be more effective in fighting the coronavirus than Gilead Sciences’ remdesivir,” wrote Sharon Lerner on 26 May 2020 in the publication The Intercept, in an article titled “Despite the hype, Gilead’s Remdesivir will do nothing to end the coronavirus pandemic”. Gilead Sciences is well known for ridiculous scams including a course of liver medication which costs $84,000.

Interestingly, both India and Bangladesh’s diplomatic arms suddenly decided to gift Nepal planeloads of Remdesivir a few weeks ago. This leads me to suspect Big Pharma marketing went into overdrive, using all marketing channels including diplomatic ones to arm-twist poor countries into using this dubious drug. As to why WHO continues to endorse this drug is moot.

Previous research shows pandemic deaths can be underreported by a factor of seven. With 1.12 million recorded deaths worldwide, this means we could now have approximately eight million covid-19 deaths. Many deaths could have been caused by lethal medical and pharmacological interventions, especially in highly developed countries like the US, France, Spain and Italy. That’s an iatrogenic disaster.

In countries like Nepal where people have chosen to stay away from hospitals and self-medicate with Ayurveda, death rates have been very low. Despite evidence, Western scientific organizations like WHO continue to insist Western medicine is the only way to deal with this crisis. Dr. Tedros has not deviated from his stance that hospitalization, intubation and ventilation, antibiotics, and Big Pharma are the one and only way to deal with this pandemic.

Which brings us to Hippocrates. The Hippocratic Oath is to do no harm to patients. But it is clear millions of people have already died from two factors: a) the inherent inefficiency and lack of healing potential of the Western medical system in dealing with this pandemic and, b) the deliberate misuse of the Western healing system. If so, should not an organization like the WHO which professes to heal the world show humility and acknowledge other medical traditions may have better solutions?

Perhaps Western science is not all its cracked up to be. Perhaps the Western medical system is an elaborate and expensive hoax on some level. In Nepal, hospitals charge their Covid-19 patients heavily, then dispose of the dead without showing the corpse to the family. If unethical capitalists inside hospitals, of which they are plenty, decide to start a kidney harvesting operation, no Nepali would know. Army jawans who cart away dead bodies do not check for an operation scar. Nepal remains a key location for kidney sales, fetching up to 60 lakhs. All these possibilities should be considered with an open mind.

No amount of jeering about cow urine can take away the fact Ayurveda is an ancient system of healing involving many complex formulations which have healed efficiently and safely for thousands of years. In Nepal, most people live an Ayurvedic lifestyle, no matter how modern and professional they appear. Thankfully, most people decide they cannot afford expensive iatrogenic intervention, which saves them from ventilation, coma, and death. As a society, we are already a large scale “clinical trial” which has proved the efficiency of Ayurveda.

We seek international recognition for our system of healing. But perhaps it is time to recognize that organizations like WHO, which profess to certify and regulate medicine, are themselves very limited in understanding global healing systems, and narrow in their scope of advice. Perhaps the WHO should be labeled what it is: an outdated and irrelevant organ of what was once “Western civilization” but now looks perilously like white supremacy.

(The article represents the author’s personal views)

I got a new puppy recently. When my mother entered my bedroom she said: “It stinks in here.” The puppy had taken several pee breaks in a corner of my room, so I knew she was right. I went into my bathroom and right up on the top shelf, a previous tenant had left a nice plastic bottle full of bleach cleaner. It had a bright lemon neon sticker on it, with the helpful suggestion that a capful of the liquid in four liters of water would cure all my ills.

Although I haven’t used industrial cleaners in decades (I prefer soapnut, neem and lemon peel), I immediately pulled it down and poured the capful in a bucket. The white foam rose in a satisfying swirl. As I mopped my floor, I had a feeling of virtuosity. If cleanliness is next to godliness, I was somewhere close to paradise. The sickly perfume gave me a heady sense of accomplishment.

Immediately, however, I could tell something was wrong. An acrid smell from the mixture rose up and entered my nose. I felt a scratchy feeling at the back of my mouth from the fumes, and after a minute my throat ached. The cleaner had come with this soothing assurance: No need to wipe afterwards, just leave it as it is. But as I lifted my shoe, I could hear a crackling sound which told me a layer of chemicals was sticking to my sole.

I opened the door to see why it was so quiet outside (was the puppy eating the electric wires?) and the dogs rushed in. I watched appalled as the puppy sat down in a puddle of wet bleach. Within seconds, it had rolled around in several patches of wet floor. For about 10 minutes afterwards, it ran maniacally back and forth, chewing up my curtains, pulling off the mop’s cotton strands, and biting the other dog.

My mop left a bucket full of black water. At the back of my mind I couldn’t help thinking the liquid was a miraculous solution to my dirt problem. It was hard not to think that the bleach was a holy concoction of hygiene, necessary in a pandemic when germs lurked in every corner, waiting to attack.

This is how the industry which sells us cleaning products works on our minds. We are not good people with a connection to the divine till we’ve bleached our floors. Yet researchers have shown this germicidal blitzkrieg can wipe out our microorganisms on which the pyramid of life rests. Unicellular lifeforms like bacteria and virus form the food of microscopic sea creatures, the fish eat the small amoeba, the big fish eat the little fish, then the big fish is eaten by the mammals, including humans.

Yet we are unaware of how virus and bacteria form the basis of our lives. We are told by the chemical industries that all of these lifeforms must be eliminated—through bleaches, laundry powder, pesticides, paint thinners, etc. Chemicals in every possible molecular combinations now make up the blocks of modern life. Most, if not all, are toxic and lethal to lifeforms our eyes cannot see. The chemicals change the behavior of our children and elderly people, giving us cancer, causing life-threatening allergies, and affect our lives in many other unseen ways.

President Trump was mocked for suggesting that bleach should be introduced into the human body to kill the coronavirus. The fact he saw this liquid as a miracle “medicine” is not an accident. America’s chemical industry has worked hard to create the notion that chlorine-based cleaners and solvents are healing, good, and holy.

Chlorine is known to be carcinogenic. Yet drinking water is chlorinated in modern, advanced Western societies. The quantity is minute, people are assured, and its only action is to kill the bad germs. We have no idea how much damage these vast swathes of chlorinated water have done to wildlife.

Chlorine may be a sacrament for modern cultures, dripped religiously onto the floors where babies play, in much the way as holy water is dripped onto the babies getting baptized in Christian churches. People in Western cultures feel the same sense of safety and protection from both chlorine and baptism water. But we must never forget that nothing which wipes out the basis of life is either ethical, moral, good, or holy.

I theorize one factor for the high death rates from coronavirus in Western cultures is this cult of “cleanliness.” By wiping out the macrophages which eat malefic viruses, Western medical professionals are eliminating a valuable ally from their arsenal of medicine. I read an article about the river Ganga and how it had this marvelous capacity to self-cleanse and get rid of cholera bacteria after a few hours. The scientists theorized it was the macrophages in the Ganga—the macrophages which fed on the dirt of a river riddled with sewage and corpses.

When a Nepali man coughs and spits on the ground, should we tell him to stop? Certainly if we want to stop TB. But maybe not if we want to stop the coronavirus. There is a high possibility that the macrophages in his sputum eats the coronavirus.

A few days ago, I was walking in my neighborhood when I saw an elderly woman I knew coming down the road. She was walking in an upright posture, without the help of a crutch or a stick. Her face was bright and she had a smile on her face. “You’re looking good!” I said to her. She smiled, obviously pleased.

About two years ago, I’d seen the same elderly lady, with one palm on the wall to support her frail gait. We’d gotten into a conversation. “Yestai ho, janay bela ma yestai huncha!” (‘When we’re about to die, we get frail’). I suggested she take mungrelo (nigella sativa) seeds, which help with joint health. She embraced my advice with enthusiasm. She told me she bought a bottle of the seeds, roasted them, and put them by her bedside. She popped them whenever she felt the urge to snack during the day, and ate them with her morning tea. Unlike my elderly relatives who will try an ayurvedic remedy for a few days before jumping to antibiotics and Big Pharma and surgery, this lady seemed to have no other option. Slowly I saw her get better as the months progressed. Then I saw her cured. 

This case pleases me a lot because it was the progression of Ayurvedic healing as it was meant to unfold, at its own slow time and pace. No need for joint replacements, surgeries that cost 12 lakhs, elderly people laid up in hospital with invasive surgical interventions. This old lady become fit and healthy through the simple remedy of some tiny seeds.

We have a healing tradition in South Asia that goes back thousands of years. Yet we have been taught to ignore, ridicule and dismiss it as a body of knowledge without value or scientific proof. On Twitter, the scorn against “Besarays”—people who advocate the theory that turmeric helps ward off the coronavirus—is vituperative. Where are the clinical trials, people will demand? They are seemingly blind to the evidence that the Besar Belt (including Asia and Africa) has very few coronavirus deaths. They also ignore existing scientific studies on healing properties of turmeric, including its anti-inflammatory and blood-thinning properties.

Anti-Besaray people then go on to demand Remdesivir, a drug made by a company known for its extraordinary inflated prices, including a liver drug that costs over $74,000 for a course. This is an extraordinary denial of healthcare to the masses by elites whose rip-off goes beyond ordinary fraud or swindle. We need new words to describe this kind of commercial transaction with genocidal intent, one that our current vocabulary lacks. Yet this is precisely the company the WHO is promoting, at the expense of local, easily available remedies that are already saving lives in the Third World.

I shared my mungrelo story with my great aunt. She, obviously, knows a lot more about Ayurveda than I do. She was born half a century before me. Like all modern people with pride in knowledge gleaned from the web, I assumed I was the only one to “discover” the healing properties of this seed. She demolished my ignorance in short order. “I raised my children with Ayurvedic remedies, but during my grandchildren’s time, we forgot about those. We went to the doctors and kept using antibiotics. They were constantly sick and we raised them with difficulty,” she said.

She’d used this remedy on her own children: the mother put a few jwano (ajwain) and mungrelo seeds in her mouth and chewed it, spit this mixture at the tip of the linen sari, filtered two drops of the juice, then mixed that in breastmilk and fed it to the two- month-old. Only a few of the powerful seeds are needed! The same ajwain and nigella sativa can be ground into paste, then applied to infant’s head to stop a cold. She’d put it on her nephew after a vaidya told her about it, and he’d been cured. Now imagine the money we could save from hospitalizing infants if this remedy was followed everywhere in the “poor” (but knowledge-rich) Third World. We wouldn’t need to spend lakhs on hospitalizing infants, pumping them full of antibiotics, and in general exposing a fragile infant to the possibility of an latrogenic death.

But for a modern doctor, this remedy will bring shivers because saliva contains bacteria, which must be instantly killed! Preferably with bleach. Never mind if the mother’s saliva is a key ingredient in introducing healing macrophages into the infant body. “Nowadays you can use a handkerchief,” my great aunt said. “I don’t know, maybe there was something healing about a mother’s sari.” I have no doubt there was something healing about a mother’s sari: her biome, the body, is teeming with a rich jungle of microflora and fauna which help an infant fight off disease, and what better way to introduce it into the infant than through her sari’s sapko!

Creating a microbe-free environment can be lethal, as no benefic bacteria can survive in the desert. High coronavirus death rates in the West may be caused by this overkill with hygiene.

We need to return to our roots—through the mouth and eating, through traditional food, and through the herbs we have always known and which have cured our ancestors and ensured our own existence.

Any rational discourse around vaccines is impossible because the Americans have decided—and put an enormous amount of media attention—on creating the anti-vaxxer. This individual is always irrational, motivated not by science but by propaganda, and hysterical in their response to vaccines. They reject all vaccines not on the basis of rational evidence, but an intrinsic notion that vaccines are malefic.

Americans of course love to reject the grasp of the authoritarian state and any restrictions on personal freedom and choice, which is why they’re averse to both masks and vaccines, in equal measure.

This creates an added problem when individuals outside America try to debate the merits and demerits of vaccines. Americans assume everyone is a default American and we all think the same way. This, however, is not true, although it might not be apparent to the average liberal American who reads the New York Times and rants against anti-vaxxers.

I come from Nepal where everyone gets vaccinated and wears masks. But I still have questions about vaccines.

Let’s take the Covid-19 vaccine, rapidly being developed by Russia, China, UK, US, India, and myriad other countries. There’s a race to be the first country to create it, in the same way nations raced to get to space.

Because of Bill Gates and GAVI, the idea that a vaccine will cure this pandemic is seen to be the only answer. Gates cunningly managed to get $9 billion, from rich and poor nations, for his vaccine solution. The last interview of Mr. Gates, adoringly presented by some big media houses, showed him talking about how at least one among the six or seven vaccines being developed should work. It was unclear whether he thought people should take them simultaneously, or one after the other.   

Will the vaccine cure the pandemic? In Italy, large number of elderly people died in February and March 2020. One factor that stands out is the quadrivalent flu vaccine the Italian government provided for free to all citizens. “Quadrivalent” refers to the vaccine’s ability to suppress four types of flu virus strains. Elders over 65 were encouraged to get themselves vaccinated. The new vaccine was thought to be cost effective at 6 euros for a shot, cutting down the cost of hospitalization for pneumonia and bronchitis.

Yet despite the vaccinations, according to an article “Investigating the impact of influenza on excess mortality in all ages in Italy during recent seasons (2013/14–2016/17 seasons)” published in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases, Italy had a higher prevalence of influenza deaths than other European countries.

“Italy showed a higher influenza attributable excess mortality compared to other European countries, especially in the elderly.”

Quadrivalent vaccines are cell-based. They are grown inside mammalian cells, instead of inside chicken eggs. So already we have an added complication here in which we have to trust the vaccine makers not to make a mistake with microscopic cells. These are not the simple vaccines of the past. This is a whole new and unknown biological apparatus in which multiple factors could go wrong.

Italy’s hundreds of coronavirus deaths among the elderly (9 percent mortality rate) may have been triggered by the quadrivalent vaccine, which suppressed their immune response to coronavirus. A small cold boosts immunity by building up the immune response. When people are shielded and show no response to the viruses of everyday, any new viral infection can bring down the house.

Are vaccines always safe? Italy suspended two batches of a Fluad flu vaccine made by Swiss firm Novartis after four people died shortly after receiving the drug, according to BBC. TIME magazine reports 11 deaths. Vaccine safety is never guaranteed. 

As science has become more complicated and opaque, so has disease. The Covid-19, for instance, seems to have a link with a bat virus which scientists in China were collecting from bats in caves. For some inexplicable reason, scientists then spliced these viruses into human cells to see if they would spread respiratory diseases. The fact a pandemic followed soon after is vociferously rejected by Chinese scientists as having any link with their research. But rationally we can assume there might be a connection between bats, artificial insertion of virus into human cells, and subsequent pandemic. This research was conducted with US government funds going to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, via American NGO EcoHealth Alliance.

So why is this pumped up version of genetically modified science, which glorifies the minute workings of the microscopic cell, the in-thing right now? Why is it getting all the funding? Why is there no ethical review of its potential harmful impacts? Is it because it gives an added measure of power to scientists by working with phenomena that ordinary people can’t see and understand?

Is the vaccine, created in troubling, opaque ways, and which in the past has shown to cause large number of deaths in Italy’s elderly, still the answer? Or are we pursuing this in the mistaken belief that science is supreme and we must follow its logic above all else?

The coronavius is a multi-headed hydra that requires careful, rational response from governments, policymakers, anthropologists, nutritionists, and traditional healers, among others. We can’t leave this at the hands of one man whose main qualification is selling the world a lot of clunky, soon-to-be-obsolete software.

One day in 1998 I was walking down the street at Kantipath when a man came straight at me with his elbow extended, and poked me in the breast. This sort of street harassment was fairly common back in the day, and may still be—it has eased off somewhat in my late 40s. The explosion of adrenaline that followed in my body is something I won’t forget. I remember lifting my knee, and smashing into his crotch with my DocMartens boots. (An aside: Men, if you are thinking of poking a woman on the breast, always make sure she’s not wearing DocMarten boots.) A group quickly gathered. An enraged female with adrenaline coming out of her ears surely has good cause, and the harasser was soon dispatched by the kangaroo court.

I think back to this episode at times, because it reminds me how casually the man asserted his droit du seigneur, his masculine right, to invade my space and violate my body.

As I read about the feminization of poverty and the ways in which the gender pay gap will not close in a hundred years, of how even the women of the most gender-equal countries do more hours of housework than their male spouses, it occurs to me the masculine grab is also well and truly operational in the economic sphere. A recent report concluded that women in India were less likely to be employed than they were a decade or so ago. Coupled with demographic loss of women due to amniocentesis, rising gender violence, and entrapment in bonded servitude in both home and low skilled employment, this is a surefire way towards one gender enslaving the other—in perpetuity.

How has this become possible? One reason is of course the current economic system which favors men. Money is printed, through some inexplicable sleigh of hand that only rich countries know the laws of, in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, and Europe. These marvelous currencies of great value are then distributed through Old Boys Networks, creating stock value and unicorns. Through old, established channels, they make it outwards to the colonies, where they are so valuable they pick up the tea, coffee, sugar, bananas, coconuts, and anything else edible grown in the “poor” countries. They also buy up the lithium, the gold, the diamonds, and any other material needed for the production of our current luxuries, including electronic goods and technological devices.

Where does this system which looks remarkably like colonialism of olden days leave the approximate 3.5 billion women of the world? If they’re not part of the elites of these rich countries, then it’s a $2/day existence, struggling for basic food, water and shelter. The fantastic capitalist system working so wonderfully for the rich never makes it down to the poor, not even with the generous crumbs handed out by the international banks like the World Bank and the IMF.

In other words, the slavery we thought we’d eradicated is still very much alive and working in invisible ways—through the billions of women who do unpaid household and care labor so their husbands may go abroad to the Gulf to work in semi-slavery conditions to pump up petrol, or mine minerals, or clean toilets for the uber-wealthy of the rich nations.

Women make up half the world but they are completely cut out of the current patriarchal system of Old Boys Networks and the networks of capital which flow in the West, crushing the autonomy and dignity of 99 percent of the world’s citizens.

Under the guise of the Enlightenment civilization, democracy and human rights, the West has effectively managed to garner the unpaid labor of billions of women in the Third World for its own utility. What we have now is slavery on a mass global scale involving billions of people, something not seen even in the days of the Atlantic slave trade.

The only way out of this morass is to take off the blinders and create an alternate financial system, one in which women globally get fair compensation for the work they do to keep the rich nations afloat. A Global Women’s Bank, which prints currency used only by women, and which can be used for food, water, education, shelter, clothes and health care, must be set up asap. This bank must also give out loans so women can access capital to start businesses. This bank must disburse a universal income to all women worldwide.

To imagine the current system, where men have grabbed all wealth and resources, time and money, opportunities and panel spaces, will bring about social change is to delude ourselves to the increasing degradation of human dignity. The current gendered state of have and have-nots is insupportable. Of course, men benefit when women are empowered: the more excluded the women from the economy, the poorer the community becomes.

As late capitalism has become more intense, so has poverty. Only for Bill Gates, Steven Pinker and their ilk is the global growth story a rosy one. For everyone else, it’s a struggle into a vaster and vaster quicksand of indentured slavery. The only way out is to create a completely separate system of finance, rather in the way women have their own toilets. Nobody objects to women having their own toilets—why should they object if they have their own currency?

The Black Lives Matter movement has brought to the fore the need to decolonize spaces dominated by Eurocentric economics, philosophy, and epistemology. Nowhere is the need for this more urgent, in the era of locust attacks and imminent famine, than in the soil. I’m talking about the dirt beneath our feet that has become the next frontier in the life and death battle between the colonizers and the colonized.

When we talk about land being exploited—drilled, covered with chemical fertilizers and pesticides, dried out and blown away in extreme storms—we are talking about the dirt that we step on every day. The mud we are covering up, inch by inch, with asphalt is the mother earth, which gives us life. Without soil there would be no basis to grow food, no foundation to break down the cells of organic life when they die, no way to recreate the eco-cycle of water.

Yet Western science and technology has created a world in which the only rational way to live is to cover all of the life-giving, breathing skin of the planet with impermeable tar. Anything else is poverty.

As to where this astonishing conclusion came from, we’d probably have to go back to the history of the automobile. Automobiles require surfaces hard enough to withstand weight of thousands of tons of steel, and wear and tear on rubber tires. This then became our benchmark of human urbanity—the ability to cover every centimeter of breathing soil with black tar.

A 8 July, 2020 Guardian article ‘Spreading rock dust on fields could remove vast amounts of CO2 from air,’ by Damien Carrington, the paper’s environment editor, made the strange argument that pulverized basalt, a rock by-product of cement factories, would not only improve soil by adding minerals, but indeed was essential to add to agricultural soil as it absorbs emissions and halts climate change. Anyone dealing with industrial cement in their garden, as I have done in the past decade, knows that nothing will grow once you cover the soil with ingredients of concrete.

The casual way in which they assumed that this was the next logical step—cover last remaining landmass of living topsoil still exposed to the cycle of wind and weather with a by-product of cement—is proof of how easy it is for a big industry to tip the scales of entire ecosystems of nature with one money-hungry, self-enriching fix.

It also shows how human civilization has ended up with so much rubbish passed off as enlightened must-have goods. From plastic sneakers to pesticide-sprayed food, from bitumen highways to sealed concrete skyscrapers, we’ve been schooled to think of these giant follies of human capital and engineering as the acme of cognitive brilliance. People in the US and the UK are now facing the consequences of these foolish actions as hundreds of thousands die in a pandemic that remains under control in the Third World.

But who can tell this boastful, ego-bloated, uber-wealthy civilization that inhabiting a sealed concrete skyscraper, where the viruses of respiratory pandemics circulate through air conditioners, is in fact an appallingly stupid way to live?

Despite all evidence, the WHO will continue to insist that the vaccine is the only answer to the pandemic and keep collecting funds from poor countries to give to Bill Gates’ pet GAVI project. They will not examine the evidence of indoor air flow and how that could be the perfect conduit for viruses to go from one floor to the next, rather like the collapse of the World Trade Towers, which kept falling down in a perfect sequence, floor above crushing floor below. To do so would mean questioning the basis of their most cherished architectural edifice, the sealed concrete tomb of the skyscraper. The skyscraper is the 20^th century architectural model of urbane perfection, and the only model for how all buildings, including hospitals, should be built.

Nepali communists, inspired by dizzying spaghetti highways Chinese Communists proudly boast of, have also started to smash up our fragile mountains to build “pakki” roads that last a monsoon before washing away, taking hillsides with them. While consulting for World Bank in 2009, I took part in a discussion in which one official admitted the costs of repairing Nepal’s roads were like pouring water in sand. Any “pakki” blacktop road lasts only a few monsoons. Yet this is the only solution that is heavily funded with loans each year, including $450 million this year from the World Bank. Sustainable ropeways, horse and donkey trails, easily repaired pedestrian paved stone paths, and wire bridges get no funding.

Decolonizing the planet would require removing all bitumen and asphalt that now cover the earth. It would mean bringing down all skyscrapers that are ticking time bombs of epidemic contagion. It would mean treating the earth with respect, and fertilizing the soil with organic manure and hummus, not chemicals that now dry them out to moon dust. It would mean a complete halt to spraying of toxic pesticides that originated in labs as weapons of war. It would mean a global ban on all forms of plastic.

It would mean a return to our roots as creatures of nature, where survival depended on syncretic symbiosis with all of life, not a cyborg embrace and enslavement to digital technology. Decolonizing the planet would require a decolonizing of the mind.