Coronavirus India | Has Kajodi Reached Home? | Our South Sudan Moment

Photographer - Salik Ahmad -
Captioned: 90-year-old Kajodi trudges home 400 km away amid coronavirus lockdown.
Published in - https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/india-news-90-year-old-kajodi-trudges-home-400-km-away-amid-coronavirus-lockdown/349525

Many years ago, the Wanted Series initiated the dialogue on ethics in photography. A seminar was organised at Max Muller Bhavan Delhi in collaboration with Goa-Cap and Askar. Subsequently, the Goethe Institute at New Delhi tried to formulate a working group which would explore the question of Ethics in photographic practices. A large seminar was followed by a couple of close think-thank meeting, and then we all disappeared. Going back to the conversation that we generated, I remember being numbed by the impossibility of it all. Yet, ethics as praxis and as a concept metaphor has always remained important to me as a critical tool while looking at (looking through) any cultural act or artefact. In today's world, we can no longer hold on to the notion of a 'Universal Good'. Over the years my notions of ethics have been shaped by moral negotiation processes, red-flagging arbitrariness or manipulation.

 Kevin Carter, 'The vulture and the Little Girl',  first appeared in The New York Times on 26 March 1993. Image taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_vulture_and_the_little_girl 

'The Vulture and the Little Girl' is perhaps one of the earliest instances in recent memory which threw up grave questions regarding ethics in photojournalist practices.  Initially, Carter claimed to have come upon the scene, snapped a few photos, and then chased the bird away. 

 "You won't believe what I've just shot! … I was shooting this kid on her knees, and then changed my angle, and suddenly there was this vulture right behind her! … And I just kept shooting – shot lots of films.  Silva asked him where he shot the picture and was looking around to take a photo as well. Carter pointed to a place 50 m (160 ft) away. Then Carter told him that he had chased the vulture away. He told Silva he was shocked by the situation he had just photographed, saying, "I see all this, and all I can think of is Megan", his young daughter. "   (https://joesackcom.wordpress.com/2019/08/01/the-vulture-and-the-child-what-happened-next/) 

These were Carter's immediate words to his colleague João Silva, (a part of the Bang- Bang Club specialising in reporting from conflict areas). However, Carter eventually admitted that he watched the scene for about twenty minutes, waiting for the vulture to get closer to the boy and hoping that it would spread its wings for a more dramatic photo. After the vulture refused to move, Carter finally chased the bird away. 

Salik Ahmad's ' 90-year-old Kajodi trudges home 400 km away amid coronavirus lockdown' succeeded in spotlighting the effect of CONVID lockdown on the migrant labourers of India, apart from photo narrating plights of victims during the conflict, it also bears similarity to Carter's image in the use of dramatic foreshortening and depth-of-field. There is one crucial difference and this perhaps reflects the culture of consumption in our times. The readers of Outlook and the online viewers of the image raised no question regarding the fate of Kajodi. How did the photographer intervene in a human capacity? Did he (even) offer her some water to drink? Has Kajodi reached home?

 Many years ago…in the early 90’s Cater and New York times had to face these questions and these questions made the photographer and publication realise that lines between being a photographer and being a human being could not be blurred beyond a point. Carter’s eventual suicide about 5 years after taking the photograph should not be directly linked to the psyco-emotional impact of 'The Vulture and the Little Girl'.  He had seen enough morbid violence and death in South Africa and Sudan for any sensitive soul to be deeply affected.

Contrary to perception, photojournalism has an uneasy relationship with ‘truth’. The ‘girl’ from South Sudan turned out to be a boy, and Carter framed the shot to maximise the impression that this disaster was taking place in the ‘middle of nowhere’ where in reality it was on a runway with her parents just a few minutes away in a place surrounded by UN workers and journalists. In Salik Ahmad's work, I do not know if her name is really Kajodi, is she really 90 years old? Is her village really 400 km away? Such details get lost in the spectacle of a tragedy and conflict generates. In a way, way beyond truth, this is a work in the politics of representation. 

Photographers easily forget that their subject matter is (at least) an equal collaborator in the economic and cultural capital a picture produces. They also (always) forget that they are very much a part of the frame, that they exist within the photograph and not outside it. If political photography and photojournalism want to break through the structures they critique, these realisations are important.

It is not Coronavirus it is your Desire

Many of us do not understand this lock down, we don't know what is beyond the plateau of a flattened curve. Right now we are like clockwork. When pushed to work for the sake of our and social survival we do so till be collapse -  then when told to stop work for the sake of our and social survival, we are trying to do so until we collapse. This is my  take - 1 in my personal attempt to understand this code.

When I was in class 8 (?), I understood what a virus is. Clearly it cannot be Chinese or Muslim, cause virus is not even a living cell. In fact like it is more conceptual; like religion and nationalism, viruses are not free-living; i.e., they cannot reproduce and carry on metabolic processes without a hosting on living creatures, but once they do find hosts then they can manipulate host behaviors to create environments in which to thrive and spread. My biology teacher had explained that viruses were not 'living beings' thus they cannot be killed, that's why we still had flu...explaining how vaccination and building anti bodies were the only hope. (Right now I will avoid looking at this as a political metaphor).

Since then a lot of water has flown under many bridges that I have crossed. HIV came, made the word virus a household name. I understood the danger, yet felt safe in my middle class cocoon. Safe sex was doable, and the media made me feel that HIV happened to either the rich or the poor...the middle class were to be worried about cancer...which was not a virus (though I was scared for my friends who pushed sugar). Many years later, SARS came in. My partner and I were thrilled! Chicken prices came crashing down we feasted for a whole month! Of course misplaced nationalism had a role to play in this act of bravado, as Indians our immunity was supposed to much higher, one of the great perks of living in one of the dirtiest nations. On a more serious note, I did begin (re) looking at the research around viruses, specially because governments and corporate started investing in cures.

Then one by one these cure/vaccine research projects began to shut down. Suddenly an old frustration, (which I felt heavily in my class 8 but never really expressed) began to rear its head. How come humans have made so much scientific  progress taking us from moon to Mars and beyond, to make nuclear weapon and power plants, to do pretty much anything...but could not cure us of common flu. Slowly it became clear that the answer to this lay in the priorities of funding. The pharmaceutical industry would actually lose money if some commonly available cheap drug was produced which could cure the flu.

Cut to the season on 2019-20, the times of COVID-19. The initial reaction was almost similar to SARS...and then like an avalanche it began to spread and take over. Before we knew it, February was over and by March, the world was entering into its lock down phase. Initially, my mind went numb. Much energy was spent in checking into my resources. Checking up on relatives, friends, students. Then the emotional stress of the lock down, coupled with the stress of 'work from home'.

The first trigger for me was the crisis of the immigrant contractual laborers being homeless, stateless and criminalised. The brutality that is unfolding in lockdown  situations globally and the normalisation of it all is unparalleled in civil society in the post WW-2 period. It slowly began to dawn that  COVID-19 had scared even the capitalists in power. Which seemed strange and confusing. After all we had seen so many epidemics. Also, contagious diseases like tuberculosis had also affected and killed the rich but there was never such a panic in such a large scale. Then of course in India we have had dengue for years now, so may people die every year post monsoon...but even in the most dengue ravaged, mosquito infected zones there has never been a lockdown.  What exactly was happening now? How is COVID-19 different ?

The clues (unsurprisingly) came in from the USA and (once) Great Britain. Led by Donald Duck and Boris Jonson, these two countries (along with Brazil and Turkey) have resisted the lockdown mode the most. Choosing the normal flu containing technique of evolving herd immunity and treating only  the severely ill and  quarantining the known infected were the measures taken up...and this turned out to be a severe misjudgment and is today costing many lives. But why did these measures fail so drastically? What pose does COVID-19 contain that it continues to overwhelm all our social structures?

The answer blows not in the winds of COVID-19, but in the winds of our Desire. Or rather on how our desires and our capitalist social structures have co-produced each other. After the WW 2, and the wave of decolonisations we had the space and time to imagine a new world order. We ended up voting for governments and policies which has led us to stick pile so much nuclear weapons that the world can be destroyed many times over. We have dreamt of taking vacations on Mars, designing all kinds of cosmetic makeovers, dreamt of destroying Pakistan, invested in Formula 1 technology...bullet trains, statues....

So we created a world with excess capacity of nuclear and non-nuclear ammunition, but a world where ventilators are scarce. Yes, it is that simple...we are under a lockdown, medical and para medical personnel putting their lives at risk, contractual workers are being left to die...because the world has a shortage of ventilators.

COVID-19 is mimics the commonest flu in the manner in which it spreads, making it highly contagious.  At the same time about 20 percent of infected people would need intensive medical attention and among them a sizeable portion would need ventilator support. So what COVID-19 essentially does is to expose a deep glitch in the system which is just not geared for community health crisis, or any kind of health crisis which outside the sphere of the pharmaceutical industry and its profit making. Most of us will survive the COVID-19 even if we catch it...but clearly the system will not. This lockdown, is an attempt by the existing capitalist machinery to save itself from collapse.  It is never your health that they are worried about.


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also, do read -

• https://www.marxist.com/italy-the-coronavirus-epidemic-is-an-emergency-but-capitalism-is-the-real-disaster.htm
• https://www.quantamagazine.org/viruses-have-a-secret-altruistic-social-life-20190415/
• https://www.britannica.com/science/virus