Am I one of the few people with the rare distinction of belonging to a dishonest and hypocritical Indian middle class that claps hands and lights candles because the prime minister asked them to do it, and then ostracizes healthcare workers because they believe that the former could be carriers of Covid-19? This is not even realizing the role that healthcare workers are playing in ensuring the well-being of everyone.
The government and the media have virtually declared a class war on common people with the assistance of the police and the complicity of the middle classes. Literally, the common people are shown as villains violating the lockdown and the police with a colonial mind-set brutally assaulting people as saviors. All of this is done by those who simply fail to understand that the virus makes no such distinctions: that is why it is called disease; it affects the common and the not-so-common alike; the poor and the rich; the policeman and the politician; actors and businessmen; bureaucrats and intellectuals of the right or left irrespective of their superficial, half-baked agendas.
As a society we’re indoctrinated by films where everything is black and white. There are heroes and there are villains. Interestingly the villains are usually surrounded by working class men who work for them as henchmen. These days all of a sudden, doctors, the police and civil servants, who often were in the villain category, are elevated to the position of “warriors”—another aggressive term to which I seriously object because it is about fighting a war. A war happens between people. This is a disease. There cannot be warriors with a disease. I have no idea why we should be fighting a war with a disease instead of understanding the causes and finding a cure for it. We need to have the right words for a clear perspective.
An authoritarian state needs an infantile middle class in order to create the conditions of a society at odds with itself. People who do their duty are not heroes. They are just part of a system in which they play a particular role. I agree that the job of being a doctor or a nurse might be a trying one in these circumstances. That still is duty.
For exactly the same reason I don’t like the idea of referring to soldiers as martyrs when they get killed in battle. No, they are not. A soldier is a person who gets paid to protect his country. Martyrdom is an extraordinary and rare phenomenon where someone gives up his or her life because they believe in something so deeply that it becomes greater than their lives. Socrates was a martyr for reason and Christ for truth; Gandhi was a martyr for nonviolence and so was Martin Luther King Jr. Goodness is only when you do something other than what you do as a part of the obligations associated with your work. There is no heroism in real goodness. It is just there like running water or warm sunshine.
There is risk in any work you do. I felt that I risked my reputation and well-being in whatever role I played as a teacher at a university. That didn’t make me a good person because it came with professional obligation. Risk is built into everything you do. However banal it may seem life is a risky business. I think it was Kafka who said that each time he went to bed he felt that he might not wake up the next morning. Sleeping became a metaphor for dying because there is no assurance of waking up.
Kafka understood what risk meant in a dark way; the black writer James Baldwin celebrated risk; according to Baldwin no one can fall in love without knowing the enormous risks it entails. To embrace the idea that there are risks in everything you do is a way of being closer to your true self. Failure, humiliation, suffering and death are risks built into whatever goes by the name of humanity. Risk is real and risks are essential. If people who are in the position of dealing with the Covid-19 are at a risk it comes with the job as much as it comes with their lives. There is no need to turn them into heroes and see the violators of the lockdown as villains.
What is the basis to attribute villainy to someone who violated the lockdown except for utter condescension on the part of those who conform to an authoritarian agenda without asking questions! The lockdown is merely to save the skins of governments and to protect powerful interests even if in effect it helps in containing the virus at some level. Like the problematic term “warrior,” “lockdown” is a word for imprisonment. I dread to imagine the plight of parents with little children who have to keep them indoors the whole day entertained and cared for. Children innately rebel against the idea of indoors. I have never seen an infant with some consciousness of the world not being excited at the thought of going outside home. That’s human nature; it is hard to keep people locked down irrespective of how many viruses are there in the vicinity.
This doesn’t mean I am against practical distancing which is extremely necessary. For the first time in my life, I actually saw Indians standing in a queue and not literally falling on each other. Practical distancing is indeed useful. It’s not healthy for people to be standing so close to each other. I am for practical distancing as long as it remains just that. To that extent, people can be persuaded to respect a healthy practical distance in the attempts to prevent the spread of the virus. I think by now most people understand the importance of practical distancing. They don’t need a degree in Euclidean geometry for that.
The category I find much more useful than “heroism” or “villainy” is stupidity and its opposite, imagination. In fact stupidity that comes from half-knowledge, from indifference to the sufferings of others, from being caught up with one’s own self, from ignorance stemming from lack of empathy for what is happening to the world around, from imagining that there are no problems on this planet except our own, this is something that needs to be addressed. Bad parenting and education which does not have space for the cultivation of the heart, poor role models such as our politicians and film stars, all of this create a culture of self-centeredness in which there is no faith in the future. Most people want to be in positions of power only because of the money and prestige it brings without even knowing whether they are fit to be there at all.
A hundred years from now the past thirty years since the beginning of globalization will be referred to as the age of mediocrity. Never have so many average minds occupied positions of authority ranging from the Director-General of W.H.O Mr. Tedros Adhanom (who should resign at the earliest if he has any honor left for not doing enough to prepare the world for the crisis) and almost every head of state (I stopped counting), actors without a worldview, and the IT crowd who think that that they can manipulate history because so much depends on computerization, these are the people who in their folly are capable of endangering the planet itself.
If indeed as the ancient Egyptians believed the heart is the seat of intelligence, we need to have more and more competent people with imagination and empathy at all higher-level positions. We cannot let any other artificial criteria replace intelligence and commitment to human welfare. There’s a point when the absence of these things is bound to backfire and everybody pays for the collective cynicism. At this point in time given the looming uncertainty, the future seems dark as ever both for the economy and for the mental health of a lot of people. However, it is not late: the world should unite in refusing to accept insensitive and uncaring leaders without a vision at any higher position. Unless that happens, the devastation in human terms is going to be unimaginable.
Prakash Kona is a writer, teacher and researcher who lives in Hyderabad, India. He is Professor at the Department of English Literature, The English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad.
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Heroes & villains
Posted on April 15, 2020 by Prakash Kona
Am I one of the few people with the rare distinction of belonging to a dishonest and hypocritical Indian middle class that claps hands and lights candles because the prime minister asked them to do it, and then ostracizes healthcare workers because they believe that the former could be carriers of Covid-19? This is not even realizing the role that healthcare workers are playing in ensuring the well-being of everyone.
The government and the media have virtually declared a class war on common people with the assistance of the police and the complicity of the middle classes. Literally, the common people are shown as villains violating the lockdown and the police with a colonial mind-set brutally assaulting people as saviors. All of this is done by those who simply fail to understand that the virus makes no such distinctions: that is why it is called disease; it affects the common and the not-so-common alike; the poor and the rich; the policeman and the politician; actors and businessmen; bureaucrats and intellectuals of the right or left irrespective of their superficial, half-baked agendas.
As a society we’re indoctrinated by films where everything is black and white. There are heroes and there are villains. Interestingly the villains are usually surrounded by working class men who work for them as henchmen. These days all of a sudden, doctors, the police and civil servants, who often were in the villain category, are elevated to the position of “warriors”—another aggressive term to which I seriously object because it is about fighting a war. A war happens between people. This is a disease. There cannot be warriors with a disease. I have no idea why we should be fighting a war with a disease instead of understanding the causes and finding a cure for it. We need to have the right words for a clear perspective.
An authoritarian state needs an infantile middle class in order to create the conditions of a society at odds with itself. People who do their duty are not heroes. They are just part of a system in which they play a particular role. I agree that the job of being a doctor or a nurse might be a trying one in these circumstances. That still is duty.
For exactly the same reason I don’t like the idea of referring to soldiers as martyrs when they get killed in battle. No, they are not. A soldier is a person who gets paid to protect his country. Martyrdom is an extraordinary and rare phenomenon where someone gives up his or her life because they believe in something so deeply that it becomes greater than their lives. Socrates was a martyr for reason and Christ for truth; Gandhi was a martyr for nonviolence and so was Martin Luther King Jr. Goodness is only when you do something other than what you do as a part of the obligations associated with your work. There is no heroism in real goodness. It is just there like running water or warm sunshine.
There is risk in any work you do. I felt that I risked my reputation and well-being in whatever role I played as a teacher at a university. That didn’t make me a good person because it came with professional obligation. Risk is built into everything you do. However banal it may seem life is a risky business. I think it was Kafka who said that each time he went to bed he felt that he might not wake up the next morning. Sleeping became a metaphor for dying because there is no assurance of waking up.
Kafka understood what risk meant in a dark way; the black writer James Baldwin celebrated risk; according to Baldwin no one can fall in love without knowing the enormous risks it entails. To embrace the idea that there are risks in everything you do is a way of being closer to your true self. Failure, humiliation, suffering and death are risks built into whatever goes by the name of humanity. Risk is real and risks are essential. If people who are in the position of dealing with the Covid-19 are at a risk it comes with the job as much as it comes with their lives. There is no need to turn them into heroes and see the violators of the lockdown as villains.
What is the basis to attribute villainy to someone who violated the lockdown except for utter condescension on the part of those who conform to an authoritarian agenda without asking questions! The lockdown is merely to save the skins of governments and to protect powerful interests even if in effect it helps in containing the virus at some level. Like the problematic term “warrior,” “lockdown” is a word for imprisonment. I dread to imagine the plight of parents with little children who have to keep them indoors the whole day entertained and cared for. Children innately rebel against the idea of indoors. I have never seen an infant with some consciousness of the world not being excited at the thought of going outside home. That’s human nature; it is hard to keep people locked down irrespective of how many viruses are there in the vicinity.
This doesn’t mean I am against practical distancing which is extremely necessary. For the first time in my life, I actually saw Indians standing in a queue and not literally falling on each other. Practical distancing is indeed useful. It’s not healthy for people to be standing so close to each other. I am for practical distancing as long as it remains just that. To that extent, people can be persuaded to respect a healthy practical distance in the attempts to prevent the spread of the virus. I think by now most people understand the importance of practical distancing. They don’t need a degree in Euclidean geometry for that.
The category I find much more useful than “heroism” or “villainy” is stupidity and its opposite, imagination. In fact stupidity that comes from half-knowledge, from indifference to the sufferings of others, from being caught up with one’s own self, from ignorance stemming from lack of empathy for what is happening to the world around, from imagining that there are no problems on this planet except our own, this is something that needs to be addressed. Bad parenting and education which does not have space for the cultivation of the heart, poor role models such as our politicians and film stars, all of this create a culture of self-centeredness in which there is no faith in the future. Most people want to be in positions of power only because of the money and prestige it brings without even knowing whether they are fit to be there at all.
A hundred years from now the past thirty years since the beginning of globalization will be referred to as the age of mediocrity. Never have so many average minds occupied positions of authority ranging from the Director-General of W.H.O Mr. Tedros Adhanom (who should resign at the earliest if he has any honor left for not doing enough to prepare the world for the crisis) and almost every head of state (I stopped counting), actors without a worldview, and the IT crowd who think that that they can manipulate history because so much depends on computerization, these are the people who in their folly are capable of endangering the planet itself.
If indeed as the ancient Egyptians believed the heart is the seat of intelligence, we need to have more and more competent people with imagination and empathy at all higher-level positions. We cannot let any other artificial criteria replace intelligence and commitment to human welfare. There’s a point when the absence of these things is bound to backfire and everybody pays for the collective cynicism. At this point in time given the looming uncertainty, the future seems dark as ever both for the economy and for the mental health of a lot of people. However, it is not late: the world should unite in refusing to accept insensitive and uncaring leaders without a vision at any higher position. Unless that happens, the devastation in human terms is going to be unimaginable.
Prakash Kona is a writer, teacher and researcher who lives in Hyderabad, India. He is Professor at the Department of English Literature, The English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad.