RAYYAN BAIG The freedom is price less whose value can’t be equated with anything else in life. The man is born free, values freedom the most and jealously guards it, and at times goes to any extent to protect it. Instinctively the animals also prefer freedom over everything else. A birdin a beautiful cage, in the company of its companions and abundance of feed in secured environments prefers to escape to the freedom on the very first opportunity. In humans the freedom is generally taken for granted, one only feels its absence when some restrictions are imposed on him. Dick Cheney, ex US vice president rightly said, “It is easy to take liberty for granted, when you have never had it taken from you”. The restrictions on freedom of thought and freedom of speech are painful but freedom to breathe in fresh air and freedom to move around are the most agonizing. The Coronavirus has resulted in the ailments, deaths, and financial losses and deprived human beings from the precious “freedom of movement” at a scale never witnessed before. People from all over are confined to their homes, even in the most advanced countries of the world. They can’t visit parks, attend marriages, send their children to schools and continue their businesses etc, and there is uncertainty about the life/ future. The entire world, including the UN, is worried about the situation and pumping in tremendous funds to control Coronavirus. There have been various deadly and contagious diseases in the recent past but never such a concern was shown by the world because it didn’t curtail the freedom of people. The medics, intellectuals, journalists, jurists, and different world organizations etc are all striving in their ways to control Coronavirus and restore the freedom. In this self-absorbed scenario where each individual and country is thinking about itself, an affable voice “Howdy Buddy” is coming from IHK. The people of IHK are not abashing the World rather asking in sympathy about the life in a lockdown of just a few weeks. They are inquiring as to how does the life look like in the absence of the freedom of movement, not to mention the freedom of speech and freedom of thought. They are soothing the world and telling them not to panic as just a few days of lockdown have passed, while they are braving it for the last 35 weeks. They are telling the people of the, so called, civilized world not wobble on not having the right to move freely as they are still surviving without the right to move, think and speak. They are telling them not to quake as they have the best medical facilities, whereas the people of IHK have none. They are telling them not to worry as the entire world is regularly updated about their sufferings, and is concerned about them, but not about the people of IHK. They are asking the world about the losses they have suffered so far, versus they feared to suffer had they asked Indian Government to stop lockdown of IHK? They are specially asking the worlds’, so called, biggest democracy and its public about the taste of lockdown. Ex-president of Indonesia Mr Sukarno once said, “The worst cruelty that can be inflicted on a human being is isolation”. The relative isolation being suffered by the world due to corrective lockdown has no match with the protracted isolation of the people of IHK due to coercive lockdown. The people of IHK, however, wonder whether the world would still think about them after the divine shakedown or forget them like ever before.
