India's tryst with pigs

Hey guys.. I’m back! Tonnes of work and a busy schedule kept me from blogging. My sincere apologies! But now I feel compelled to write, more than anything else. Recent goings on have drawn me to the ever-reliable MS Word. Times are churning out unbelievable events…hitherto unseen, unheard of!

One of them, which I’m sure is on everybody’s minds (hopefully not on their throats!) is…yes, you got it right.. swine flu! Pigs have suddenly caught the imagination of one and all. If you discount the Chinese, nobody ever gave them so much importance apart from eating them of course! (The Chinese have some strange astrological methods wherein they denote years by animals and to them a ‘pig’ is a sign of fertility and virility!) Never before has the word ‘swine’, (popularly perceived to mean ‘dirty’, ’lowly’, ’disgusting’) been used so frequently! It has rudely gate-crashed into the modern, urban lexicon. The flu, on the other hand has made people do things they would never have imagined were even ‘do-able’.I was, at what many would like to call the epicenter of it all-Pune when pigs burst upon the national scene. And I have never witnessed such mass hysteria in a very long time. Imagine a whole city covered in masks! The Taliban guys would have been jumping in joy had they seen it! All the ‘wallahs’ including rickshaw-wallahs, tapri-wallahs, udupi-wallahs and pav-wallahs were donning masks! Even our house-maid, armed with a mask, who I’m sure had never known what even ‘flu’ meant was buzzing with information and statistics about swine-flu. Initially there was apprehension, shyness coupled with misinformation. “Yikes!!, you crazy ??!!, how can you wear masks in the classroom in front of the teacher?” , ignorant people would remark. My friends outside Pune would laugh at me when I told them I wore a mask for a whole day in college. However, a couple of deaths laid such reactions to rest! May all of them rest in peace! Some others turned vegetarians overnight (??) while others stopped going to the gym!

Suddenly there were public announcements at malls, theatres, plays urging people to wear masks or to cover their mouths with something. It was as if everybody had been jolted out of their slumber. It was a like a different kind of ‘social-awakening’. Revolt against swine-flu! In a knee-jerk reaction people fled Pune. Loads of students from outside the state ran back to their home-towns. Swine flu had done what Raj Thackeray has been unsuccessfully striving to do. It had driven away the dilliwallahs and biharis back to where they came from! In fact, maybe swine flu can be used as a formidable deterrent by places like Mumbai and Pune against the ever-growing inrush of the ‘bhaiyyas’ from UP and the ‘babuas’ from Bihar. Imagine Raj Thackeray’s men brandishing vials full of H1N1 viruses at stations!

Anyways, gradually the situation is settling down. Panic is deflating. I discovered that all the talk of people shunning malls was bullshit. I couldn’t find a place to park my car in a mall which has a humongous parking space! Fear is giving way to humor. My gym instructor suggested this flu become a bi-annual affair in view of the unexpected ‘flu-break’(which is, by the way as long as an average Christmas break)! Just the other day I got an SMS ‘forward’ saying that the Americans have asked India to warn all the gujratis here to not line up outside American embassies……since H1N1 is not a type of visa!