In 2008, working in New York, every week I would hear about my friends losing their jobs. In the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, every US bank was dead or tottering. Lakhs of people had lost their jobs, houses, and bulk of their savings.
I thought I was seeing the darkest days of my life. I was so wrong.
For all the tragedy, nobody died in the financial crisis. For many, the loss was made up later. But when someone dies, you can’t make it up.
Today, we have bloated dead bodies filling up a river shore in Bihar. In a Gurgaon hospital, apparently, doctors abandoned patients to die in the ICU, presumably when the oxygen ran out. Which murder is viler?
In some places, there are no hospital beds. In others, no oxygen. And for the really unlucky, even a decent cremation is now a luxury.
Everyone has to die someday, but not this way. Not by death sentence when oxygen runs out.
It is hard to talk to anyone these days, for the only update you hear is death.
Is there hope?
As long as we live, there is hope. Because we can’t live without hope. Things will be back to normal someday, hopefully soon. The stock market will recover. The jobs will come back. Offices will reopen.
But the dead won’t come back. We will have to live with it. Forever.
– Rajan