Compassion during a pandemic
Humanity has never been so targeted, for almost a century! But, three months down the line, after the virus hit the globe, I realised, it’s more a story of the response generated to the aggressor rather than the aggressor.
All kinds of weird stories are surfacing. Women and child abuse, medical workers being targeted, wives being murdered.
I have matured (reasonably) on Thich Nhat Hanh and Osho (Thigh Nhat Hanh, a legendary Vietnamese Buddhist teacher, who started a global movement of peace and Osho, an evolved spiritualist who redefined Indian scriptures) and it has been wonderful learning! Learning about mindfulness, breathing and compassion, definitely equips a person to take a steadier grip on life. The calmness, which emanates from one person, goes a long way towards peaceful co-existence.
Be it any religion in the world, compassion is the first lesson taught by them. How come this doesn’t apply to politics?
I am going through the migrant situation in South East Asia and compared to the painful situation of migrants in India, I have reached this presumption that we have failed in globalisation.
As nations and citizens with natural citizenship, we have exploited the lobby of migrant labor to the hilt and we ditched them when the going was tough. None of these nations charted out back ups and relief measures for this section of society.
Every day for the last month, the television sets in India are beaming these images of men and women walking hundreds of kilometres, with aged parents or toddlers on their shoulders. A daughter is driving her father in a rickshaw from one state border to another, undertaking a journey of unimaginable distance.. A man is carrying his aged mother on his back and slowly trudging across the asphalt - hot and smoky, to his native village. And there are no relief camps providing food or shelter on the way for these helpless migrants.
The irony is that these poor migrants are not the originators or carriers of Covid-19; rather we, the urbanised population, who travel across countries and continents, are the real spreaders of the virus. Yet who suffers? The poor migrant!
It doesn’t matter whether it is in India, that inter-state movement are blocked and borders sealed, or whether it is the movement across international borders like Thailand, Singapore and Burma, which brought countries to a halt and imposed lockdown. What is significant, is that the state machinery refused to handle the issue of migrant labor with compassion.
They are the most vulnerable part of the international society, caught between citizenship and statehood! No adequate healthcare coverage or supporting medical infrastructure has been provided for this non-state, non-citizen class.
The exodus generated at all checkpoints has just proved one thing that we failed to look after, the weakest link in the chain, and this has resulted in our own self exposure.
As long as responses to the pandemic are localised, non-compassionate and restricted to individual states and nations, global and national response will be flawed, and constricted. Global community has to understand and absorb that viruses spread irrespective of citizenship or statehood. We need to handle this vulnerable migrant class with a lot more compassion!
Like this post? Check out Reema’s website for more.
