Our priorities and anger are a joke

A few years from now, those cries for help amid the pandemic will be a distant memory, as will the images of bodies being burned on the banks of rivers. Representation pic

I lost a friend to Covid-19 a year or so ago. We weren't close, and it had been years since I last met him, but that doesn't take away from the fact that this was someone I had known for a long time. He was a delightful man: warm, kind, with a smile that still appears before me if I close my eyes. He left behind a wife and two children. I never had an opportunity to meet them but have thought of them often since I heard of his passing.

We accept death easily when it doesn't affect our personal lives in any way. It's easier in a country like ours where thousands die unloved and ignored on a daily basis, mere statistics in a poverty-ridden nation. I can't come to terms with the loss of my friend though, because this wasn't supposed to happen. He had a secure life and the means to save himself. I don't know if he was vaccinated but he should have had access to medical care. And yet, because this is a virus that we still have little control over, he couldn't be saved.

I can't reconcile myself to this loss because even though most of us now know someone who succumbed to this pandemic, we seem to have collectively decided to absolve our government and move on. I ask myself why my friend had to die, not as an existential question, but as one that has real answers. We all have recourse to these answers if we choose to scratch the paper-thin veil we have put up between ourselves and the past couple of years.

India's official death toll from Covid-19 crossed 500,000 a little over a month ago. Numerous reports in impartial media outlets outside our country have pointed out that these figures don't take into account inaccurate surveys or underreported and unaccounted dead. On paper, our country had the fourth-highest tally of deaths globally, but experts have routinely asserted that our figures are much higher. And yet, none of this has translated into any outrage or anger against what has been a shambolic response by the Central government. We seem to be okay with half a million countrymen dying, leaving behind millions of dependents, because moving on from tragedy comes too easily to us.

I often compare our response to governmental failure with the kind of anger we reserve for movies that aggravate us. This happens more often than it should, because getting riled up about cinema is a national pastime for a majority of us. I think about the fierce protests outside cinema halls or the abusive messages on Twitter and compare those responses to how we agreed to forget the desperate cries for help posted online less than two years ago. Everyone I know recalls the anguish and fear that ran through the homes of families and friends, but none of us appears to have had conversations about responsibility or accountability.

We trot out excuses about our poverty as a country when our government fails to do its job, but simultaneously propagate the lie about how we are a ‘rising power' with tremendous potential when it suits us. Which of the two are we? Shockingly large amounts of our taxes disappeared into government coffers during the pandemic, for which we received almost nothing in return. Where is the outrage about why people we know died while hospitals were denied funding?

I am painfully aware of the fact that my friend's death means little in the larger scheme of things. He is now nothing more than a number, a casualty like a million others. His death won't inspire change because we have already begun the process of slipping into the lives we knew before the virus appeared. A couple of years from now, when we are fully engaged with the exhausting business of living, those cries for help will be a distant memory, as will those images of bodies being burned on the banks of the Ganges. No one will be held responsible.

Families across our country have been torn apart, and I think about the children left behind in the hope that they grow up and look for answers. I hope they do what their parents failed to do and hold the government of India responsible for its catastrophic failures. I mourn the loss of my friend, but what I mourn more is the absence of anger that has allowed us to forgive politicians who don't deserve forgiveness.

When he isn't ranting about all things Mumbai, Lindsay Pereira can be almost sweet. He tweets @lindsaypereira
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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper