A couple of days ago when the Odisha Special Relief Commissioner rightly restricted the Durga Puja idol size to a maximum of 4 feet, a hue and cry ensued as if heavens had come crashing down.
The Cuttack city Puja organisers fumed and fretted, which was normal given their level of understanding the complexities of life. Routinely, BJP leader Samir Dey and Md Moqim, the incumbent local Congress MLA, have to thrive on making some noise against the Government decisions for their political survival.But along with them, Bhartruhari Mahtab, the sitting BJD MP, renowned medico Dr Siddharth Das and a seemingly knowledgeable lawyer Dharanidhar Nayak kept expressing anguish over the idol size reduction saying brazenly that there was no way the size of an idol could boost spread of infection. They do not most certainly have the rock bottom faculty to figure out how attractive objects pull unruly crowds.
Most shockingly, the BJD MP, evidently against the ruling dispensation, did not hesitate to poison the minds of gullible masses by saying provokingly that evil would set in if the age-old idol size is ignored, no matter what.
Bhartruhari went one step forward to instigate the Cuttack grumblers to petition the High Court to intervene and pass favourable orders. These people have proven to be enemies of mankind. When the corona pandemic struck India, Odisha was the first State to clamp lockdown in March 2020. Three days later, Prime Minister Modi locked down the whole country for nearly three months until slowly un-lockdown processes were begun after immeasurable death disasters had occurred. How people suffered then is ordinary history today.
Odisha was also the first to install sophisticated testing equipments and organise maximum hospital beds and nursing health workers in record time.
But because of the virus with strange powers was extremely difficult to contain, lives couldn’t be saved easily as was happening all around the world. It took months to know how exactly the virus was invading the host, multiplying and causing damage at different organ locations. Medicos just managed to discover some basic behaviour of the pathogen and picked some skills to save lives by managing on symptoms only without ever being able to know what drugs would prevent multiplication of the virus.By the end of September, the surge levelled and suddenly began declining rapidly. The world revelled believing the corona was gone.
By December, like elsewhere, the common folks of India too went berserk. They proudly got off guard, merrily discarding the mask, laughing off social distance norms and deriding hand hygiene protocols.
The virus, lurking coolly all around meanwhile, had comfortably mutated to become more lethal. No wonder, it struck like a nuclear bomb. The second wave did not give much time to the human species even to brace up. All the specially made Covid hospitals, having been closed days before, could not be put together to become functional in a hurry. Wits at all levels were completely lost. Around this time, frighteningly rising positive cases had literally driven authorities and experts blank in the head. The second corona wave has etched indelible history for posterity.
Now even after huge sero-positivity proof all over the world and widely-vaccinated people in most countries including India, the pathogen doesn’t seem to have accepted defeat.
It has mutated even faster and is even infecting immunised humans. The non-vaccinated kids now stand most vulnerable though they can fight back well. But what needs to be borne in mind is that vaccines lose efficacy after six months. And mildly sick kids are likely to make the elderly severely ill.
So, the Americas, whole of developed Europe, Australia and the rest of the world including the declared Covid-free Israel and New Zealand are now back to masks, social distancing, hand hygiene and other stringent Covid-appropriate behaviours. The corona is still around.The extreme pain and pressure experienced by human species all over the planet in the first wave and, helplessly so, has created medical history.
When corona kept playing around, every other medical activity, including cancer treatment and critical research, was abandoned only to devote all available time to scan the virus and get to know how it spread and killed human hosts in matter of only days.
By the grace of the Almighty, they managed to see the pathogen through and succeeded in developing several effective vaccines in record time. Once the first surge of infection waned and people started getting vaccinated, Governments imagined the pathogen was vanquished forever.
Naturally therefore, the world was flung open giving kind of an impression that the virus would never make a comeback. But the virus, lurking all this while, made a second invasion, this time with much greater intensity and virulence. Bhartruhari Mahtab, doctor Siddharth Das, lawyer Dharanidhar and the opponents of the lifesaving safety measures would do good to know that in 2015, the Deshapriya Park had brought Kolkata to a standstill during the Pujas attracting lakhs of curious visitors that thronged to see the 88-feet Durga idol, nearly causing stampede because organisers had publicised the statue to be the tallest Durga in the world. So, the 2020 statue during the pandemic was purposefully reduced by the organisers to a 10-feet idol.
The objective as they made clear was solely to scale down the celebrations which would not attract visitors in huge numbers that would make following Covid behaviour practically impossible.Similarly in Maharashtra, the size of Ganesh idols in public celebrations across the state has been restricted to four feet in view of the pandemic. So much so that even the idols installed at home for private family puja were expected to be not taller than two feet, said a notification issued by the Home Department of Maharashtra.
The notification also made it mandatory to use marble or metal idols during the Ganesh festival. And if clay or other materials were to be used, the 'visarjan' (immersion) ceremonies would have to be either at home or in artificial ponds if organised in the area by civic authorities.
The guidelines further said public organisers should make arrangements possible to provide online Ganesh darshan, puja, aarti, etc., through cable systems, websites or social media. Under no circumstances would any visitor be seen around the Puja pandals, which could implicate organisers in criminal cases.
So, the people of Odisha must begin to question the knowledge and intention of the MP, the MLA, the long-lost Samir Dey along with the medico and the legal brain.