March 25, 2020

Thooka: I tell you, because of this wretched coronavirus this country is becoming like a dictatorship.

Thooki: Too true. As if all these lockdowns in so many places weren’t bad enough, now the sarkar in Kerala and in Maharashtra is imposing fines on spitting. Just imagine! If you spit in Kochi you get fined 5 00 bucks, and if you spit anywhere in Maharashtra, you have to shell out a whopping 1,000 bucks. Did you know your spit was so costly?

Thooka: I didn’t. And as other states come up with similar rules, the cost of spit and spitting is going to go higher and higher. And all because some say that spitting spreads diseases.

Thooki: Nonsense. Everyone knows that far from being a disease carrier, spit is a healing agent. When as kids we fell down and scraped our knees and elbows didn’t our moms tell us to put spit on them so they wouldn’t get infected?

Thooka: They did indeed. And for all anyone knows, spit could be the secret cure for coronavirus everyone’s looking for. So instead of fining us spitters for spitting, the sarkar should rewardus for performing a public service. Besides which, isn’t the right to spit a constitutional right? What was it that one of our great freedom fighters said? Spitting is my birthright, and I shall have it.

Thooki: Actually, I think what he said was ‘S waraj is my birthright, and I shall have it.’ Thooka: Swaraj, spitting, same thing. If we don’t have the freedom to spit as and when we like in our own country what was the point of winning Independence from the Brits?

Thooki: Well said. So to assert our Independence from foreign rule shall we do one thook-shook?

Thooka: But mightn’t we get fined?

Thooki: Don’t worry. I’ve already deposited an advance fine of Rs 10,000 with the authorities. So together now …

Thooki and Thooka (together): Acck, thooo….!

secondopinion@timesgroup.com blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/jugglebandhi

Carona Virus and the Generation Gap

Now it’s not that i don’t understand my father. Or his generation. This is a group of people who have internalised a different notion of risk acceptance. The world they lived in forced them to tolerate a high level of risk, you had to ride a speeding bus by balancing on the edge of the last stair, holding sweatily onto a rod with your nose nestling in some stranger’s armpit, it was either this or not going to work. They let us play cricket on the streets with cars rolling by, they didn’t call to find out where we were every few minutes, because we had no mobile phones, and landlines didn’t work much anyway.

They have grown up seeing people die much more than we have, the random malignancy of the universe is just a part of the background noise for them, shall we stop living because of this they say, an apocalypse on paper yet, and we shall deal with it when it is here, and right now my odds of being killed by a flower pot falling from a third floor balcony straight on my head are higher than this coronavirus thing, so i am going out. The chicken isn’t just going to walk over to our place.

Public outreach is not going to change this mental model of risk. Any janata curfew will ultimately be broken, because people of a certain age, paradoxically the one that is most at risk, aren’t going to take it seriously. Add to it WhatsApp conspiracy theories which thrive on confirmation bias and so-and-so said this-and-that, and what we have is a ticking time bomb whose clock is now just a tick before blastoff.

The only way out is conversation. Talk to your elders. Give them the “or Gabbar Singh will take you away” conversation they once gave you. Use every emotional atyachaar trick you know works on them, accept you are over-reacting (don’t get into that futile science argument) but still insist they stay home. Because ultimately what will make them stay at home safe won’t be headlines or the PM or mathematical models from WHO. It will be you.