It is now learned that a person recovers from a personal crisis, such as divorce or bereavement, through a seven-step process. Denial, fear, anger, bargaining, guilt, depression/disappointment and acceptance. I would like to believe that society goes through a similar process when faced with a crisis like the ongoing pandemic which affects a large number of people. Of course, at any given time, individuals will appear at different stages of this process. Each of us knows about the deniers and dare-devils among us, but two years later, as a society, we are somewhere between despair and acceptance.
Scientifically, a pandemic usually ends with an end (amic) game. In societies, this usually ends when absurdity abounds and humor makes its way. The pandemic is no joke, but humor is an essential coping mechanism to deal with adversity and is key to getting past the acceptance phase. Look a little further than the obvious, and irony and humor seem to serve as ‘vaccines’ everywhere.
The World Health Organization (WHO), in its infinite wisdom and in consultation with its member countries, decided to name variants of Sars-CoV-2 after letters in the Greek alphabet. The “type of concern” is decided based on the properties of the virus: how easily it spreads, the severity of the disease, clinical potential, therapeutic drugs, the performance of vaccines, and other public health measures.
WHO is currently monitoring some of these types called alpha, beta, gamma, delta and omicron. Most people have only a faint recollection of the Greek alphabet. Initial letters that have some role in high-school math are better recognized. As the 15th letter, micron has no such name recognition, even though it has some uses in advanced mathematics and astronomy. WHO continues to monitor some other variants including epsilon, eta, iota, kappa, zeta and mu, although they are not currently a concern. The WHO, revealing its cleverness, decided to drop the characters of Nu and Xi altogether. It did not want to confuse the public with ‘nu’, which contrasts with the ‘novel’ nickname for this coronavirus. And since the original purpose of adopting the naming convention was to isolate the virus from its ‘place of origin’, the WHO tactfully shied away from using ‘Xi’. So, we have arrived at the ‘O’ omicron of the Greek alphabet. The next letter of the alphabet is ‘Pi’. People are taking comfort from the fact that the value of pi famously has a ‘non-repeating’ decimal. Alas, this also does not end. The WHO has not yet stated if we need to go beyond 24 letters in the Greek alphabet, or in fact it will only use one of ‘phi’, ‘chi’ and ‘psi’ to avoid phonetic confusion. Will you decide to do it or not?
Society today represents itself in the best possible way through memes on social media. Did you know that ‘meme’ is short for ‘mimeme’, an ancient Greek word for ‘imitation thing’? British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins used the term ‘meme’ of the world to represent an idea or style that spread within a culture through person-to-person imitation, often carrying symbolic meaning. Wikipedia states that “a meme serves as a unit to carry cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, which can be passed from one mind to another through writing, speech, gesture or other imitative phenomena with a mock subject.” can be transmitted. Proponents consider memes to be cultural analogues of genes, in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures.”
Novel coronavirus and social memes, with their shared Greek heritage and inbuilt virality, appear to bear genes from the same cluster.
Hundreds of memes are doing the rounds. Common themes are related to alcohol, food, facial expressions, war, extra-terrestrial and Bollywood dialogues observing people living on Earth. The war metaphors are particularly ironic because they celebrate ‘inaction’ as a way to conquer this menace. The phrase “your country wants you” has been replaced with “your country needs you to stay home”, explains Lord Kitchener, who was Secretary of War in the British cabinet during World War I. For Indians unaccustomed to the idea of personal space, social distancing has been a recreational discipline almost impossible to follow. There is more to our ways than simply maintaining a distance of six feet in zeal for space at the Kumbh Mela in the north or at the Melmaravathur Adiparshakti temple in the south. The second season of the popular Family Man streaming show stars its protagonists, RAW agent Shrikant Tiwari, masked and away. It seems that the TV watchers thought the mask had been photoshopped.
Memes don’t age well, but often perfectly render the moment. Memes are like inside jokes to a group of people who care about the same thing. Covid has been a big topic. The Seven Stages of Society in Crisis is evident from the ghost towns we encountered during our initial lockdowns and hangs humor amid today’s quasi-observance of protocol for Omicron amid last year’s delta wave.
And so, as another new year rolls on and Omicron is getting furious but hopefully giving way to a more benign pie, take strength from the absurdity and humor of it all. And don’t forget to socially distance, wear a mask and wash your hands. Repeat.
PS: “An internet meme is a hijacking of the original idea. Instead of being changed by random change, memes are intentionally altered by human creativity,” said Richard Dawkins.
Narayana Ramachandran is the chairman of Include Labs. Read Narayan’s mint column at www.livemint.com/avisiblehand
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