#ThoughtsandPrayers

Written in April 2020

“Pray for the Corona warriors, the doctors, the healthcare workers, the e-commerce employees.”

“Thoughts and Prayers for India’s heroes”

All of us would have received/seen some variation of this now — a WhatsApp status, a forward message, a tweet seeking thoughts and prayers or any of the other countless ways.

Thoughts and prayers… an interesting phrase isn’t it? So sincere, so honest, yet so banal.

Yes, after the crisis, it is the contribution and donation of people that is keeping most people afloat. Mass infrastructures of charity and welfare organizations, aided by technology, are at the forefront of ensuring food, safety, and shelter for the people who need it very much. No doubt that there are, thankfully, a lot of people who act on these thoughts and prayers.

I saw a relative of mine proudly posting on her Facebook feed that she had donated 1000 Rupees to a charity and that she was praying for the welfare of everyone fighting this disease #thoughtsandprayers. Much appreciated, but I know the lady in question. In general, she is cruel, vindictive and I have personally seen her screaming at waiters, customer care personnel and grocery store clerks for minor grievances.

“I am paying you money, you are supposed to do your job”

“where do they even get these people”

“I am the customer, the customer is always right” were some of the highlights that I had heard.

It was interesting to juxtapose this with the donation. How many such thoughts and prayers were out there? Peer pressured statements and rehearsed answers. This is in no way to question the genuine outpouring of kindness and the torrent of action undertaken by kind souls.

But we are also naïve to think that there aren’t assholes amongst us. People whom you have seen abusing or mistreating people, that they are allegedly better than -Maids, drivers, cooks, delivery personnel, security guards…etc.

They might be loving fathers, amazing mothers, respectable spouses but still this. You know why? Because you get to see a person’s true character by the way they treat someone they have nothing to gain out of. You get to see a person’s true colors during a meaningless transaction.

That frustration which she can’t take out on her boss or children, she will vent out on the waiter who brought her the wrong dish. The anger that couldn’t be vented at her spouse gets expressed on the security guard who dared to ask her to wear a facemask.

Thoughts and prayers give them an excuse to hide. Hide under the blanket till things wash over, only for them to be back to their usual Asshole self. Thoughts and Prayers is just a meaningless self-serving platitude, a feeble “Look at me, I am a nice person”

From one other such individual, I received a message in WhatsApp -

“The world is wrecked by this virus because it has deviated from the ways of the elders. This is happening because the younger generation has failed to pray more and is busy spending time on meaningless things like social media etc. Praying sincerely and generating positive vibrations is the only hope for the world to recover”.

It went on to spout some other nonsense, but I thought that was an interesting conclusion to arrive at: We haven’t really prayed and hence we are suffering.

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It was 1984, the year of Indira Gandhi being assassinated, the year of the first flight of the Discovery space shuttle, the year of Apple announcing its Macintosh computer, the year of the US Olympics.

It was 1984, Summer was at its peak in Amstetten, Austria. A small town that was an hour’s journey from Vienna. Elizabeth Fritzl was a 17-year-old living with her parents.

She was on her way out to meet her friends when her father asked her to help him mount the doors to the basement that he had recently built for their house. She went with him to the basement and helped him mount the door.

It was 1984, the year in which Elizabeth Fritzl’s life was taken away from her.

Neither murder nor rape. Nothing so easy and quick.

When she turned around to leave, her father held a rag dipped in chloroform against her face. That was the last time she saw daylight as a kid or as a young adult.

Her father, who doesn’t deserve the honor of being named, took her to the basement and chained her to the bedding near the pipes. Just as he had planned. He told the outside world that Elizabeth had run away to Vienna to join a sect and made her write letters, which he then posted from a post office.

When she finally stopped shouting or rather when she lost the will to, she was rewarded with chains only around her hips, and not around her neck and legs. She was raped close to 3000 times by her father. She gave birth to 7 children in that same basement dungeon. Amidst rats and leaking roofs during rains.

She was given a 1960s book on childbirth, some antiseptic, some bandages and was asked to figure out childbirth. One of her children died in her hands 65 hours after being born. Her father burned the body in a wood oven. There was no concept of time passing for her. Was it a day or a year? Made little difference to her plight. Time was a faraway concept in the outside world.

Her father brought three kids out of the basement and convinced the society that they were abandoned at his doorstep by Elizabeth with a letter that said she was leaving them at his care. Those three kids were the lucky ones, their memories too malleable and their understanding too little of what was happening around them that they accepted the story about her mother and grew up as almost normal kids under the care of the grandparents.

In all of this, Elizabeth’s mother allegedly still had no idea that this was happening underneath her footsteps. While they were having garden parties with their friends upstairs, Elizabeth was eating the cheap supermarket food stocked by her father in the basement. While her children played in the lawn upstairs, she was trying to teach whatever she knew to the ash skinned, malnourished children. Children who did not know what daylight looked like nor what running or jumping meant.

This story seems like fiction doesn’t it? Something out of a perverse mind. It was indeed born out of a perverse mind. Unfortunately, every single thing about this is as real as the earth we stand on and all of it happened.

It was 2008, the year of the great recession, the year of the first African American president, the year in which the large hadron collider first operated.

It was 2008, the year in which Elizabeth Fritzl came out of her captivity.

After 24 years in the basement, her now aging father finally let her out as one of her teenage kids was now dying and he couldn’t support both families above and below.

Doctors described her and the children’s condition as deathly pale and malnourished. She and her kids were put in dedicated wards for focused PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder)treatments. Psychiatrists came out shaken after the truth of what she and her children went through was slowly being pieced together. Her father was tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison. A prison for the criminally insane.

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Coming back to thoughts and prayers… Imagine the number of times she would have prayed, beseeched, begged, yearned, pleaded for someone to hear her. Imagine the longing she would have had for any divine being to hear her voice and to bring an end to her pain. Prayers didn’t help her. Thoughts didn’t help her. Positive vibrations did not help her. People did.

The Austrian government promised to cover her lifetime expenses. This was over and above the millions of dollars, people donated for her sake. She was placed in an anonymous village to protect her from additional PTSD and media.

She and her children were given new anonymous identities.She now loves shopping, taking her kids to school and is obsessed with keeping her house clean. She had also fallen in love with the security guard tasked to protect her.

Volunteers and citizens of the village have taken it as their duty to protect her and her children. Acting as a blockade from unwelcomed visitors. The Austrian government press and healthcare workers voluntarily agreed to seal all records of her details as top secret. All that exists now is the photo of her 17-year-old self.

I am sure everyone who helped her prays and continues to pray for her wellbeing. But it was not their prayers and positive vibrations that helped her

They also acted and will continue to act.

Our collective transient concern for the frontline personnel in this war against the virus will be futile if restricted to #thoughtsandprayers. If we go back to mistreating, abusing and shaming the same people we celebrate now, then these thoughts and prayers mean nothing.

You don’t have to donate money, you don’t have to send forwards, you don’t have to do any damn thing, except for treating fellow human beings with respect, regardless of background, color, caste or creed.

If we are not reminded of the importance of that even after this, maybe we don’t deserve to survive.

We deserve to survive only when we stand up against these everyday instances of bullying and class superiority.

The next time your best friend or spouse or parent, behaves in a manner that is derogatory to another grocery store worker or nurse or security guard or maid, call them out. Loudly and clearly.

Time for thoughts and prayers is over.

Time to act on them is now.