What’s it like to be an Indian right now?

Well, you wake up, bleary eyed, sleep deprived, anxious and the first thing you do is check your phone and hope like hell that nobody you know has fallen ill while you’ve been sleeping. Testing positive for Covid-19 in India right now is likely a death sentence. While in the US and UAE, we’re all either vaccinated or waiting in line to get our vaccines and have started the return to normal life, in India, you hope that by some miracle your loved ones come out of this unscathed. If you think that’s an exaggeration, all you need to do is take one look at Indian social media. There’s no escaping the desperation and anxiety you feel as an Indian both at home and abroad as India faces the worst Covid-19 surge.

Every single social media platform, from Twitter to Facebook and Instagram, has hundreds of thousands of pleas for help. Pleas for a bed, pleas for life saving drugs, for oxygen, for ventilators, an ICU bed, and the most traumatic: pleas to help find the bodies of loved ones that have gone missing from hospitals.

“Urgent requirement for oxygen and ICU bed for a 25 year old in Delhi,” was the most recent Instagram story I woke up to. Followed by “urgent requirement for Remdesivir and Tocilizumad. Will drive to neighbouring states to pick it up”. Eventually, one message in particular broke me: “please help me contact Delhi police to find my father’s body.”

To call it a warzone would be unfair to those that have suffered through hell and back, but this sure feels like something very similar to what we jokingly said to friends at the start of the pandemic in 2020-  that it was “an apocalypse”.

This problem was a long time coming. By the end of 2020, India’s apathy about Covid-19 had hit the roof. We could only watch from abroad as parties and raves were back, and the rich were flying off on holidays to the Maldives or New York. Mass gatherings like election rallies and the Kumbh Mela were back on. Even regular Indians were off on their annual vacation to Goa. It was almost as if Covid-19 was non-existent.

Bollywood celebrities holidaying in Maldives in early 2021.

Now, there are more people infected than there are hospital beds available. There are more people in need of oxygen in the country than there is oxygen available. Mass funeral pyres have taken over every available public space possible, with photos of them blasted on seemingly every single newspaper’s front page. Like every Non-Resident Indian (NRI) far from home, I’ve not seen my family in 15 months. We probably won’t be reunited before the end of 2021 – and that is likely optimistic. Our best shot at a reunion would probably be 2022 as the world closes its borders to India to stop the spread of the Indian variant of Covid-19. And like almost every single family in India, we too have had family members lose their war with Covid-19.

It’s sometimes hard to reason with yourself while you’re sipping drinks at brunch and are fully vaccinated, that your countrymen are dying. You can’t escape the desperation that claws at you and the guilt that comes with the knowledge that while you’re safe abroad, your loved ones and friends back home are not, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

But even amid the despair, there’s reason to be hopeful. My childhood friend Aditya, for example, went from the charmed life of a young single man in pre-pandemic Bombay to someone who has stepped up to help verify social media leads on oxygen cylinders. Another friend, Meghna, is helping the sick family members of total strangers find access to life-savings drugs. They aren’t the only ones – across the country, hundreds of thousands of people of every age and every social strata have become heroes, doing their part for communities, often for people that they don’t know at all.

Where authorities have failed, regular Indians and non-Indians like you and I are in this for the long haul. But try as I might, I can’t put a positive spin on this situation. Because people are dying by the thousands, if not the tens of thousands, every day. India has finally been promised vaccines, oxygen, ventilators and life saving equipment from countries in the west. But by the time help arrives, it might be too late.

Our only hope right now is that everyone takes a second of their time to amplify the resources and the organizations on the ground in India who are fighting the good fight. Every voice counts. So, can you pitch in to help save my country?

Sarakshi Rai is the Editor in Chief of Masala!.

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