The Deadly Client - Day #3 (27 March 2020) - 21 day #Covid19 Lock down

Day #3 (27 March 2020)

The Deadly Client

My knowledge of lands, in recent times, is largely only about Kerala, and to some extent Tamilnadu. For reasons, that are partly political and partly owing to my own apathy, I seem to have lost interest in other parts of the world. I haven’t travelled much, and my work took me couple of times to Europe, Philippines and Malaysia. In India, I may have seen a few places many times, mostly for work. I do sound like a stick-in-the-mud. But its true that i have a deep belonging to my home town, Thiruvananthapuram, that helps me root here.

As the Covid19 situation started aggravating two weeks ago, I got a bit panicky. Many of our friends were, for various reasons, living in different parts of the world, some permanently settled there, some travelling, some temporarily for studies, work, visits, and other reasons. I decided to call as many of them, and warn them of a possible danger. Sitting in Kerala and glued to TV news channels, three newspapers, internet, social media with friends and groups extending to people living all over the world, I sensed, like many others, that a shut down of travel is imminent. A few of them did have the opportunity to come back, and I thought they should take that chance and return home quickly.

The next three days were crucial, and many of them came back to their native towns and villages. My son, and some of his friends, rushed back home from Chennai. My nephew also did the same. Those far away, including a brother of mine, stayed back in Kolkata. My younger brother, living with his family in Denmark had already moved into self-isolation there. A close friend’s daughter, studying in Spain, is in self-isolation with her room-mates. As they all read this blog, I wouldn't want to dwell more into this. It’s just too real. I leave it at that.

During this crisis, reports were continuously pouring in from China, Iran, Italy, Malaysia, Singapore where students stranded in airports gave desperate calls to save them. Government in India worked really hard and brought back as many as they could, and some continue to be in various stages of isolation and deprivation in many parts of the world. Most workers stranded in critically affected places could not be brought back. Fortunately, many in universities with better facilities and care, are holed up in some comfort, but isolated, nevertheless.

The ICEF Monitor, a market intelligence agency for international student recruitment, reports that in July 2018, more than 7,50,000 Indian students were studying abroad. In 2019, this must have become a larger number. The large part of them (72%) are absorbed into universities in United States, Canada, Australia, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Till now, we would have discussed this as a matter of aspiration of our students, or as a matter of the inadequacy to handle the aspirations in our own country. Today we are discussing the risk of this. Only a very small fraction of them had the luck to come back into the safe space of their native homes. The others are not exactly stranded there, but are possibly in self-isolation and going through one of their worst nightmares. As the number of Covid19 affected cases and death tolls increase drastically in some of these nations, it is traumatic for parents, friends and family back here in India.

In one of the conversations in a group, a friend put up the question. “From now on, how many of us would allow our children to go abroad to do higher studies ?”. “Is it safe, anymore ?”. We wouldn’t be possibly asking this question ever, if not for this Virus.

The world has been travelling like never before in the last few decades, possibly post-globalisation. Its found all its reasons to travel,and it seemed to have enough money to do as well - for work, study, tour, trade and so on. And even locally, we have moved from a walking and cycling society to a four-wheeler and even flying society in just a few decades. Aspirations and affluence seem to go hand in hand.

In 2018, airlines globally carried 4.3 billion passengers, which was an increase of 38 millions from the previous year. Travelling for Tourism is the other big number. The number of tourists travelling across borders has reached 1.5 billion in 2019 according to UN World Tourism Organisation. This is in addition to a further 15.6 billion domestic tourist arrivals every year. Surely all this travel will bring many opportunities, including socioeconomic development and job creation.

But there is a very serious flip side to travel - greenhouse gas emissions. It is estimated that Tourism alone now accounts for 8 per cent of the greenhouse gases we emit into the air.

While the affluent travel for all reasons, there are the millions who migrate in search of jobs. The luckier ones find a good settlement, the unlucky majority is never settled. They end up in menial jobs, with no dignity, no labour rights and in slums and squalor. In Kerala alone there is an estimated 25 lakh migrant workers from other states.

And then all of a sudden, the SARS-CoV2 virus arrive on the scene. The Covid19 disease pops up in China and the virus travels all over the world. In a few weeks it is carried to destinations across the world, wherever an aircraft can land; the disease spreads. The travellers, the airports and the aircrafts quickly get identified as the carriers of the virus. And as the numbers escalate to hundreds of thousands of victims, airports are shut down and airliners grounded in most nations. Peter Piot, Director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in an interview with ‘The Telegraph’ comments “the Virus travelled by road, air and sea”. He adds that “Viruses travel by airplane nowadays”.

Tourism seems to have a got a new client, a deadly one. It travelled with millions of our species through thousands of flights. It landed in hundreds of cities and inflicted 5,85,000 people in 199 countries and territories across the world. It has killed 26,844 of our species, even as I write this sentence.

It has shut down all our travel, forced us to stay back in our homes, introspect our relationships, our longings, our sanity.

Looking out from the balcony of my home, I ponder – How much can a virus change my life?

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

- T S Eliot, Four Quartets (1943)