Like many of us today, I am finding it difficult to concentrate on anything but the most mundane. In the process, I have rediscovered my inner ‘graduate student’ self. Even now, it is easy to acquire a casual disregard for a hyper-organised living environment, an ability to cook whatever exists in the refrigerator with no particular regard for ingredients (and the ability to enjoy whatever results!). The realisation that if nobody is going to see you, you can wear the same shirt and trousers for several days, and that beds do not make themselves magically but also that it doesn’t matter. The ability to stare at project reports that take so much effort to understand, particularly with a mind that drifts from topic to topic. Endlessly worrying about the future, although in 1978, the worries occupied my younger mind also held the Micawberesque belief that something would turn up[footnote]After Wilkins Micawber, a character in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850).[/footnote].
It is not quite that easy now. These are the days and nights of physical isolation but social proximity to the vast horde of humanity that obsesses via smartphones over the latest statistics, forwards endless memes offering advice on any and everything. I’m guilty, too, of binge-watching shows that go into gory detail on the biology, the statistics, the modelling of the COVID-19 pandemic, taking comfort in the numbers and being alarmed by them at the same time. It does not help that I am in the so-called vulnerable cohort. All my friends around the world are of the same age group, and our few exchanges are marked by a genuine and worrisome mutual concern: I hope that we will come through in the end.
A meme that was circulating a while ago on social media points out that Shakespeare wrote King Lear when he was under quarantine, and (hitting closer home) that when Newton was quarantined during the great plague he laid the foundations of optics, mechanics and gravitation, and invented calculus along the way.
I have no similar expectations of humanity in this pandemic. No doubt some of us will catch up on reading; maybe some will take up weaving, playing the trombone, learning a new language (Urdu in my case), baking bread and so on, but the nature of our world is very different from that of the plague years in England. The fact of globalisation is not new but the speed of spreading is much faster now and the rapidity with which information (and misinformation) also spreads makes this a vastly over-reactive world.
William Shakespeare writes in As You Like It,
Sweet are the uses of adversity;
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.
Our present predicament is surely Adversity with a capital ‘A’, and the ugly and venomous aspects are immediately on view.
At this stage of the pandemic, physical distancing is the best thing we can do. There are many Indias, with no uniform ways of understanding issues, so having Tsarist ukases might be the best thing at this time. Yet the soul recoils from such pronouncements; we are all fellow citizens and need to be treated as such. Many of us who complied did so out of a sense of solidarity, of the knowledge that at this stage, all that really helps is isolation. And yet, the isolated carry within them the very tools by which the pandemic might be stopped.
This is a sad waste of human capital. The third largest scientific workforce in the world is largely in lockdown. There is a call from the Department of Science and Technology, from the Department of Biotechnology, from the Indian Council for Medical Research or from other similar agencies for project proposals now, with the promise that things will be fast-tracked. It seems another case of too little too late: the virus will have spread much faster than committees can meet, and knowing the Indian system, I have no doubt that committees must meet for any money to move. Any research started now will come to fruition only when this crisis is over, one way or another.
The war metaphor that is applied so loosely is inappropriate. In a war, the enemy is as tactical as you. In the present situation, the virus simply is. It is not a predator, we are not prey. It is not causing devastation by agency, but the devastation being caused is huge. But there is one part of the analogy that might apply: all battlefields are not equivalent, and the confrontation between the virus and us is being carried out in different arenas. Delhi is not Hubei, nor is Pune Lombardy, Spain or New York. Simply waiting for new insights to flow in from those locales is irrelevant to our situation, mainly because this is not a war. Those numbers will not teach us anything. We need our own research and we needed it yesterday.
It should be admitted that the crisis caught us unprepared, although there were signs that something serious was happening already in January, if not in December 2019. The scientific enterprise in India is so tuned to the fashions and fads of the world out there, justifying it by our intense need for global recognition, but here we somehow did not see global trends.
It is a truism that we are one species, Homo sapiens. And the virus is one of the coronaviruses. But that says mighty little about how the two might interact in different locales, in different social situations, because in the end, biology is a subject of details. The laws of physics, such as we know them, may be applicable throughout the universe but biology has tricks up its sleeves – tricks that require a lot of research to uncover.
The virus has been here in India for a while, but there is not enough information on how long it lasts in the ambient environment and the intense heat of the Indian summer. All of us have been told it stays on food packages but we know little of whether and how long it lives on the rediwalla‘s produce in the 40º-C heat. We are global, yes, but it would be good to have knowledge that applies in a reliable manner at the local level also. There is no real shortage of toilet paper here, after all.
The Indian response to COVID-19 had to be fashioned in our own locale, in our own environment, recognising our own constraints and limitations. And perhaps our own advantages. And now it seems more likely than not that salvation will probably come from elsewhere. Two or more clinical trials are already underway in the US and there is reason to be hopeful that one of these or one of the next set of studies will be successful. Nonetheless, we need our Kalki here and now.
For now, in the echelons of government, it appears that the pandemic is being seen largely as a management problem. How to get people to self-quarantine? How to get corporates to give CSR funds to research? How to cooperate with different countries to learn their findings? How to innovate? Laboratories are being asked to devise newer and faster tests. All very useful, of course, but should they not have been pressed into service months ago when much of the civilised world realised what was coming?
This is, after all, a major scientific issue. It was very refreshing to read from a junior minister in our government that “science alone triumphs” and “only science can help India against coronavirus” since science and not obscurantist mumbo-jumbo provides a true picture of the world. Hyperbole apart, it is such a change from the usual harping on the glorious past of India, when we led the then world in knowledge production. (This is all very well for a historian of science, but it ill-behooves a science administrator to talk about this today, when the problem confronting us is so dire.)
It would be very welcome to have all sections of our society, from the ministers and administrators downwards realise the value of scientific research that is grounded in honesty, transparency, and in sharing.
There is no substitute for funding research at all levels, generously. While it is true that we are one world and the general principles of physics and chemistry will be valid everywhere, the principles of biology are intertwined with the details of the local environment and are therefore not fully translatable. The devil is in the details, and there are many details that need to be discovered through slow and painstaking research. This is the time for senior science administrators to press aggressively for more funds for scientific research and to ensure that in the future they can deliver it to scientists, particularly in universities all across the country. Our science needs to be broad based, rooted in the local while upholding global standards. Nothing less will do.
While the present condition indeed seems ugly and venomous, the post-COVID-19 world will be very different. It has gone into the public psyche that no amount of religion can offer any protection against the disease, or even solace for that matter: the virus is dispassionately egalitarian. A general awareness of the need for personal and public hygiene will surely be stronger. And it has reinforced the fact that we are all connected, so what actions each one of us takes has an immediate impact on the lives of others. And that, I believe, is the toadstone, that precious jewel that the situation holds within, that we can reach a more just and humane society.
We are living through a time of great adversity. Our best insurance would be to have an independent and strong scientific workforce that is well funded and responsive. This crisis has shown us that we urgently need reliable and scientific knowledge if we are to protect ourselves today, or for that matter in similar situations in the future. If there is one thing we should have realised from history, it is this: pandemics, like the Terminator, will be back.
This article was originally published on the author’s blog and has been republished here with permission.
Ram Ramaswamy retired from the Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2018 and is currently a visiting professor at IIT Delhi, in the department of chemistry.