Submit your Article

The pandemic is killing people across the world and making them jobless, bankrupt, or mentally stressed. But it has also given a break to some lucky ones from their regular busy lives. I hope the readers of this column are reading it in the comforts of their homes.

If nothing has gone wrong, this home lockdown should be a great opportunity to generate good thoughts and work our way toward mental peace. But unfortunately, many of us are over-indulging in social media, filling our minds with all the junk, and dwelling on the gloom. We are only inviting misery for ourselves as we don’t know how to use our minds in the right way.

Praying for quick recovery of all the infected ones, I ask the fortunate ones to make best use of the extra time that has come as a bonus. This is a great privilege that won’t last long, and it is absolutely dumb to waste it on trifles. By pondering on the dearness of human life, we will know the dearness of the moments that build it. We can then set our minds on the right course.

The Buddhist philosophy holds human life extremely precious. There is a famous analogy to explain it: Suppose the entire earth is a big ocean and a blind turtle lives at its bottom. It comes up to the surface once in a hundred years. A wooden yoke with a single hole is floating on the water, drifting wherever the wind and waves take it. Now imagine the turtle emerging on the surface with its head sliding through the yoke. What a great coincidence that would be! With same rarity one gets chance to be born as a human being.

One has to move through different realms of existence, get countless births in one or more of them as per one’s orientation, and earn enough merits to be born as a human, according to Buddhism. These realms number six: gods (deva), demi-gods (asura), humans (manusya), animals (tiryag), hungry ghosts (preta), and hell beings (naraka).

The Buddha said human-realm is the most important among the six. The god-realm is characterized by all the material pleasures one can think of, but then it is afflicted with greed, passion, craving, pride, and attachment. The asuras may also have the material pleasures, and they may possess supernatural powers, but they are characterized by hatred, anger, and arrogance. With deluded minds, both gods and demi-gods cannot see their own bondages.

Only the humans have the intellect to see the sufferings of life, and understand that they could be overcome. The Buddha advises humans to use their capacity to work out their own salvation. He says every human has this capacity, and one should start right away, without wasting a moment of the precious life, to reach the liberating potential of the human mind.

That is great news. Far better to dwell on than the junk many of us keep feeding our minds with.

Nepali Congress leaders have been egging on Pushpa Kamal Dahal to break free from the Nepal Communist Party, his former Maoist colleagues in tow, for some time. If he agreed, Congress would help him be the prime minister, with the support of Madhesi parties. Dahal stayed put despite his mounting differences with PM and NCP co-chair KP Oli. Yes, he felt resentful of Oli whom he saw as monopolizing power and minimizing his role in the NCP. Yet he also feared the many uncertainties attached to an abrupt break-up.

Now Dahal’s disagreements with Oli are threatening to boil over, following the Oli cabinet’s introduction (and later withdrawal) of a pair of disastrous, self-defeating ordinances. Dahal is thus more open to the prospect of closing ranks with Nepali Congress and the new Janata Samajbadi Party Nepal. For it is not just Oli he has to contend with in the NCP. In the next general convention, whenever that takes place, he will also have to fend off a serious challenge for party chairmanship from Madhav Kumar Nepal, Bamdev Gautam, and possibly even Jhalanath Khanal. Rather, why not lead a new ‘pro-identity’ coalition that corresponds to his projected image as the champion of the marginalized communities?

In doing so he will also get to further mend his frayed ties with India. India had long been lobbying for the merger of the two big Madhesi parties to consolidate its hold on Tarai-Madhes, and to mount a credible challenge against the ‘pro-China’ Oli government. To effect the merger, India also prevented the last minute, Oli-engineered fissure in Upendra Yadav’s Samajbadi Party. Now, with a new ambassador in Kathmandu, the Indians will happily help shape an anti-Oli coalition between the Nepali Congress, the Janata Samajbadi and even the Rastriya Prajatantra Party. If Dahal feels further marginalized in the NCP, and takes up the bait of leading the new pro-identity coalition, he will have to, perforce, mend fences with India.

In contrast, the Chinese want to forestall a fissure in the NCP. The mighty Nepali ruling party came into existence partly because of China’s desire for a strong and friendly force at the helm of affairs in Kathmandu. True, the Oli government’s sloppy handling of the BRI dismays them a bit. But they still think China will be best served by Oli’s continuity. Who knows what a change of the guard in Singhaburdar will bring!

It will also be interesting to see what happens to the MCC bill in the federal lower house if Oli goes. Dahal and ex-Maoists are suspicious, while the Americans desperately want the Nepali parliament to ratify it. The age of the two-pronged geopolitical tug-of-war in Nepal has passed. With the entry of the Americans—not to forget the Russians—the course of events in Kathmandu is likely to be shaped even more from the outside. In this age of disinformation and half-truths, this is not so much a defeatist argument as it is a call for a more fact-based, nuanced foreign policy approach.

India’s decision to closely scrutinize the FDI originating in the seven countries it shares borders with—Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, Myanmar, Nepal, and Pakistan—epitomizes its fear of China’s growing economic might. (Six other countries have barely any investment in India.) Chinese state enterprises are on a buying spree, looking to snap up companies on the cheap in the countries rocked by the novel coronavirus pandemic, fueling fears of a Chinese economic hegemony. India was spooked. In response, China says India’s new FDI requirements amount to violation of the WTO’s “principle of non-discrimination” as well as “the consensus of G20… to realize a free, fair, non-discriminatory, transparent, predictable and stable trade and investment environment.”

These are early signs that the post-coronavirus world will not be an easy place to trade and do business in. South Asia is projected to be among the regions that are hit the hardest by the pandemic, as their remittance-based economies struggle to tackle growing hunger and joblessness. International help will thus be crucial for the region to recover. Interestingly, even as India has restricted Chinese FDI, it is still importing gargantuan amounts of corona kits from China. Even in the post-corona world, this sort of push-and-pull relation between India and China will continue. One other area of potential conflict between them will be over the virus narrative.

Indian media has been ardently pushing the line that China is responsible for the ‘creation’ and spread of the virus. Even their more nuanced commentaries have a distinctly anti-China flavor. As India’s ex-foreign secretary Shyam Saran recently wrote in The Indian Express: “There is no escaping the fact that Covid-19 may not have become a pandemic if China were a democracy with a free flow of information… This is like original sin, which cannot be whitewashed.” In comparison, Saran lauds India’s ‘open and informed’ approach to the pandemic. He argues that during a crisis there are distinct advantages of being a democracy.

As representatives of the ‘largest democracy in the world,’ the Indian intelligentsia will look to further push this pro-democracy narrative. They will also help build pressure for the formation of a ‘concert of democracies’ both in and outside South Asia.

It is hard to say right now whether the post-corona world will be friendlier to the American IPS or to the Chinese BRI. The Americans and the Indians seem confident that China’s initial mishandling of the corona crisis makes the need for greater democracy self-evident. In this thinking, projects under the BRI will be seen suspiciously as countries will no longer trust the ‘corona-exporting’ China. In reality, the poor countries in the region, which are being further impoverished by the pandemic, will happily accept any help they can get.

As I have written in this space before, at least in Nepal, with the memories of the 2015-16 blockade still fresh, the anti-China narrative will be a hard sell. Indian meddling in South Asia is an old phenomenon, while the Chinese have only recently entered the fray. Countries like Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh would like to test for themselves if the Chinese can be trusted. Things won’t change so long as India continues to be seen as the regional hegemon.

Despite ample evidence that the novel coronavirus has spread rapidly in rich, developed countries, and left poor countries unscathed, the WHO keeps up the official pretense that it will affect all countries equally. This, in fact, has shown not to be the case, after almost 3.5 months of global contagion. 

If the scientific establishment were in the service of science (and not in the business of pushing forth the notion of European hegemony and supremacy, or marketing Big Pharma drugs), it would be asking the question: why? What factors are enabling the spread of this pulmonary disease in developed economies?

Several things stand out to me. First, the evidence that the coronavirus can survive for 72 hours on plastic. All economies devastated by the virus are plastic economies. People use plastic credit cards to pay for goods and services, they eat their takeout meals out of plastic food containers, and they buy their food from plastic bowls that have been touched by multiple hands on the chain of supply.

Second, despite the evidence, all health services have also pushed the notion that plastic is sanitary. Plastic is the only material from which PPE, which purportedly protects health workers, can be made. As you can surmise, this notion is problematic and may have led to many deaths of those at the health frontlines. The PPE may be infecting patients as well. 

Third, rich economies rely heavily on refrigeration. Food which has been sitting for hours in a cooler is considered fit to take out and eat, without warming. As anyone in South Asia knows, anything that is not hot off the stove can harbor viruses and bacteria—we know this to our detriment from many cholera, diarrhea, and other seasonal epidemics tied to hygiene. Yet in developed economies this concern is waved off as a cultural superstition of Third World peoples. Surely, the much-vaunted civilized cities of the West are so much more advanced with their fridges and cold sandwiches? 

There’s also the Asian notion that food that is cold in temperature can cause cold and flu. This is considered to be a quaint belief by the West, where ice-creams can be consumed in the middle of winter in swelteringly hot, central-heated restaurants. For Asians, cold comes not just through temperatures but certain foods considered cool/cold foods on the bodily temperature spectrum. Cucumbers and watermelons, for instance, are cooling foods, while ginger and chilly are warming foods. 

This reminds me of the children’s game we used to play, where a blindfolded child has to find someone who’s hiding. He/she is taken around by another who says, “Cold, cold, cold” or “hot, hot, hot”, depending on how close the blindfolded seeker is to the hidden person they’re trying to find. “Cold” refers to “you’re off the mark.” “Hot” means “you’re very close.” Coronavirus control, it appears to me, could do with this childhood strategy—“Cold, cold, cold” and “you’re about to give yourself a cold with this chilly food”; and “hot, hot, hot” meaning “see all those Third World people who pressure-cook their food twice a day, do not eat out, and so far haven’t caught the flu? Yes, maybe it’s the hot food that’s keeping them alive!” 

Fourth, in the countries where contagion is low or negligible there is no Amazon to distribute large numbers of plastic wrapped packages. Amazon has been in the news for several reasons—low paid workers, difficult work conditions, inability of workers to organize and ask for healthcare, lack of testing for Covid-19. There’s also a recent case in which a worker tested positive after Jeff Bezos visited the “fulfillment center.” These are perfect conditions for coronavirus infected workers to spread disease all across the country via niftily delivered packages.

Fifth, lack of well-equipped hospitals may in fact have been a boon in poor countries. A very high percentage of people who were intubated are dying after the procedure. Doctors have now gone on record saying that they misread the very low oxygen numbers and automatically put people on ventilators, not paying attention to the fact people were sitting up and talking despite low oxygen figures. The doctors have also said that the cases they see are more like altitude sickness, more than the normal kind of respiratory distress they were used to seeing. 

One factor consistent amongst Third World economies: a reliance on herbal healing. Due to lack of big machines, most people in Third World countries know of a local remedy to cure respiratory problems. The Tibetan Government in Exile just handed out a black pill composed of nine herbs to its citizens—perhaps it is the first government to do so. India’s Ayush Ministry has been active online, advising people to take Ayurvedic remedies, including “golden milk”—a small teaspoon of turmeric with hot milk. Just as the rationalists (who are dropping like flies) give a disbelieving laugh, they should first do research on which system is winning the war here. 

I would personally recommend garlic soup and timmur (Sichuan pepper) to people feeling unwell. Those two cured me of my altitude sickness when I got a pounding headache at Langtang, at 3,500 feet. If nothing else, the timmur will force oxygen into your lungs without the invasive presence of a ventilator.