Context and Meaning in India's pandemic times

There are those who would say, it’s not happening to me, so why should I be bothered? Like smokers who are not yet in cancer stage. It would be in the grip of nicotine’s psychotropics, that the smoker lights the tobacco for the tyranny imposed by confinement indoors in a pandemic lockdown. It would blind the smoker to empathy for the bronchially struggling neighbour, whether it be COVID, MERS or asthma. The smokers continue this mind blindness with their self-fulfilling prophecy modes.

Some use the word #hooks to describe patterned habits. Others like to language #triggers as causing neurologically tuned responses. Being locked down in a pandemic, these patterns are subject to unexpected interruptions. These can cause #anxiety. And again, that feeling of anxiety may be different from the connotation of #stress.

The interruption from the virus has affected almost every conceivable human system. That’s because the human order maintained itself long enough in a lattice of interdependencies, essential or otherwise; across countries, continents and oceans. The blanket term ‘economy’ refers to man’s capacity to provide for livelihoods or the power to procure materials that meet physical, biological or social needs. Clothing, food, medicine or flippant entertainment. Institutions known to serve such needs are interrupted. Governments, factories, laboratories, banking, transportation and indeed health services.

Thankfully, an information architecture crawls through protocols into homes and offices to negate the megaphones of yore. Like the proverbial riff-raff on these waves and tides of information on the shores of our devices, one needs to sift through the water to distinguish pearls from seaweed, plastic trash, and human refuse. I’m calling out a few dimensions from weeks of reflection as below.

1.      People often confuse certainty for clarity. Neither substitutes the other. You have clarity of an appointment to a vaccine jab. It is not certain that your appointment will be honoured. As a home maker, you want certainty of schedule in a home delivery for groceries, as you cannot step out during lockdown curfew. It is not clear to you as to how your expectation of the quality of the food item will be, as compared to what you would fetch from the nearby store in better times. Feel free to extend this overlap in other spheres of your life. Surely, you will be less anxious if your experience of the sweet-spot between certainty and clarity match in an apogee of delight. Such as sunrise, sunset and the cadence of moisture down your taste-buds when you sip water.

2.      The Ambiguity Continuum: Individuals are beginning to hold only as much ambiguity as can be socially contained. If I check with my friend, and she does not entertain the thought, I shut it out too. If she sighs in relief of waited conformance, a contagion effect begins to have a chance. If I share with another of this recent conferment, he may amplify the message in the beginnings of an information cascade. The process of polarization begins with such like-mindedness, and dissent in such a social network is given erroneous labels as the ‘cancel’ culture or a ‘hate’ campaign. We drown in our prejudices. So, what chokes our content flows and clusters?

a.      Science and Religion are in uneasy tension, yet again. We’ve scarcely begun to see our subterranean fantasies with these as anchors of certainty. Science can yield in clarity, but the scientist has to unclutter much from the discomfort of losing certainty. Watch here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFe9AIHywfY.

Another scientist of Indian origin Bhramar Mukherjee wrote from her projections for India on 14th May thus: “This was our metrics table from February 18 and my tweet from February 21 with conjectures about the uptick. You have to watch the data like a hawk. Data can often correct your pre-conceived notions and misconceptions. Scientists and policymakers need to be data-adaptive.” Her team’s work on Covid19 in India is available for public consumption here.

For a contextualized understanding of how interdisciplinary science nestles with society and struggles with administration in India, do listen to my old friend @amitvarma interview Gautam Menon of Ashoka University here. It is a great example of the famous Kahneman construct of Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow. A great model of an interview process too. Deliberate, intentional and ecologically sensitive, Gautam's speaking from his work is something Indians can marvel at. If you care less for his antecedents, tune into to about 60 minutes into the conversation.

b.      Control and Cooperation In pandemic time, social order and controls are imposed to rein in hazards to public health. The nature of cooperation and collaboration has to overcome the biases in which fads, myths and unsustainable social norms thrive or survive.

People defend personal choices in fads and such as if it were an unfair infringement on their liberties if their .

Contexts of the personal, interpersonal and the intersubjective are not merely processes of cognition. Those who can make the distinctions and relatedness, are masterful in emotional agility. They own their grief and are unafraid to express their inner grief. They share their joys and more than often check on the capacity of the one to receive their joys. An inability to share in griefs and joys can be traced to hooks that are yet to be overcome.

• c.      Content and Container: Technology aided messaging platforms have been used by professionals in the pandemic to address traditional problems. Such as in HRM. E.g. Retention, Teaming, Social network ties, are like business as usual measurements. The pandemic context presents unique manifestations of these conventional human processes. They present issues of life and death distinctions, institutional decline and viability choices, and indeed of individual coping and wellbeing. That’s a different twist to survivorship in a sustainability imperative that eschews the finiteness of depleting physical resources for the uncertainty of human endeavours itself. Read here https://globalhealth.stanford.edu/covid-19/resources-for-the-covid-19-crisis-in-india.html/

3.      Instrumentality and Generativity: With the advent of the consumerist economy, goods that are not necessarily required by us to live are sold as objects of delusional envy and hurtful pride. The ecological compact made, erroneous as it is, socializes the unsustainable notion that resources are infinitely available as if on demand. A material acquisitive nature juxtaposes upon achievement orientations of professional careerists. The shadow tendencies of these otherwise intelligent people is not mere sociopathy or toxic individualism.

They unconsciously reduce themselves to objects of the system in which they numb their generative potentials. They hold back greater good for a larger number of people. Hoarding in tangibles, they least realize, they can take zilch to the grave or the pyre from their accumulations.

Generative spirit is socially constructed. It is the context of conversation between people that makes it so. The solo hero uses others as instruments to their sense of positional glory. The alternative consciousness emerges from an assumption that deconstructs available propositions “The goal of our conversation is for each of us to learn more about ourselves and the other as meaning makers”.

Would you still get into the alibi of belonging to groups that betray the interdependence required beyond your group? What is the nature of your group’s relationship with other groups? Maybe your residential community apportions you into a crack team for Covid guidance with a label “Pandemic Lions”. Whom do you keep out of your den? How? Why? Do feral tendencies descend on your group when it comes to allocating scarce resources among needy people?

If the meaning of your theatre is to control the actions of others, what good does it do to another, whose meaning lies in the meanings and assumptions of both you and them?

So, what’s happening inside of you as we share in the perils of our mutual existence?