India’s pied piper

His steely-eyed gaze bores into me through the TV set. He seems to get handsomer as he grows older. The beard suits him. Is he my pied piper? Will he take me to safety or to my doom?

Looking down from the manned space station, on Sunday, April 5 at 9pm Indian Standard Time, a strange appearance seems to be taking hold of the planet. The planet Earth, not Mars. A chunk of land mass goes dark, seems to go missing. What happened? And then, slowly, the chunk lights up. It’s the shape of a human really.

It has a head, a torso, a belly, two flailing arms, and two legs conjoined as one. The mass comes to life. It grows brighter and brighter. From Kashmir to Kanyakumari, from his beloved Gujarat to Nagaland, it’s glowing now. It’s a soft glow, of diyas and candles, not the harsh glow of electric lights. The mass is uniformly, peaceably lit.

There is no hint of acrimony anywhere, no rioting, no inter-communal tension. One is one with India. India is one with all.

The pied piper thought up this idea. People were getting restless sitting at home staring at one another’s faces. Indian men had deigned to step into the kitchen to learn how to cook but instead had ended up spoiling all that was being cooked. Once in a while, they even condescended to clean their houses, but then made them more dirty than before. Oh, when will this hell end, everyone moaned?

The pied piper has his pulse on the people. He had to do something. He had to banish loneliness, even if Sanjay Raut and Derek O’Brien didn’t like the idea. Raut and O’Brien do not need communal bonding; they are communal enough.

The pied piper encouraged his people to do yoga. This time it was a new form of yoga: nidra yoga. His fan, Ivanka Trump, liked his yoga so much that she practices it everyday now from far away in the White House.

Will this lockdown lock us down forever or will it release us from our bonds? Certainly the pied piper has acted faster than China and those in the West. Indians are quibbling. Oh, such a small number of Corona deaths, why am I not being allowed to watch the IPL, play golf, play cards, gossip, spit, all the things that the Indian middle classes do?

And then there is this matter: it’s a lose-lose situation for the pied piper. If the lockdown doesn’t work as expected, everyone will blame him for the escalating deaths. And if the deaths won’t escalate, everyone will blame him for the broken economy.

The pied piper was meant to be India’s Deng Xiaoping. Deng focused laser-like on China’s economy. Whenever we get through this nightmare, there will be the economy to deal with. For six years, the pied piper has accomplished many things, but he has not really been able to make the economy take off as Manmohan Singh did (twice, once as finance minister and the second as prime minister).

The pied piper must realize that he does not have much time to waste. Maybe he doesn’t have the right people around him. Maybe he does. I am not one to judge. But this crisis should make him aware that he can take nothing for granted. Things will never be hunky-dory as before. India cannot just plod on.

He lit a spark for his nation on Sunday, April 5 at 9pm. He became healer-in-chief for nine minutes. But nine minutes are not enough. He has to do a Deng. He has to do everything in his power to make India reach near-double digit growth rate. Only then will the health care system be built to tackle the next pandemic. The pied pier has to lead India to the promised land, to the land that he had promised in 2014.