Reboot and Recovery: Surviving the Virus Attack

For the last two months all our systems have been under a terrible virus attack. Various malwares and spywares have invaded our systems. Many of us have been looking at the ‘blue screen of death’ wondering how to recover our systems. The system administrators are promising to release an upgraded OS in a few days. Are there any steps that we could take to keep our systems safe and prevent another crash?

One class of malwares that has spread rampantly during these last two months are the ‘stigma and discrimination’ worms. In our anxiety to keep our own systems safe we have stopped trusting everyone else. While the broadband network can run without wires and can be contact-free, the network of relationships requires one to be constant touch and express feelings. A common sign that this malware has spread across our cities is the fear of the domestic household support worker or the maid. While maids were paid for the month of March, many were not been paid for the months of April. With the last system upgrade, maids were ‘officially allowed’ to return to their place of work, but in many cases individual employers and even neighbourhood associations forbade them from coming in. A recent advertisement of a dough-kneading machine from a very reputed manufacturer, summed up the ‘stigma and discrimination’ malware when it sought to sell its machine with the message that the maid is carrier of infection and instead of letting her touch the food their  machine is a better option. The message was based on bad ‘science’ and even worse lack of ‘feeling’ towards another fellow human-being.

Another way this malware of stigma and discrimination is expressing itself is our feeling towards a person who is returning home from somewhere else. Millions of people are returning home after all our systems suddenly shut down two months ago. First, we heard of the poor migrants returning to their villages on home on foot, cycles, vans or on trucks. Then we have heard stories about how trains lost their way and reached Odisha instead of UP. Now the flights have started and many of our neighbours who were stuck somewhere else will be returning. They will need to be ‘quarantined’. Many of us will have neighbours in home quarantine. How do we treat our neighbours will depend upon whether this malware has infected our system or not. Will we greet them and welcome them back? Will we make a daily call to check on how they are? Whether they have food and other essentials? Will we share recipes that we experimented with in these last two months? Will we share stories of our favourite serials? In short will we try to relieve them of the monotony and stress?

If, however we are infected with closely related spyware ‘snoop’, we will spend an inordinately large part of the day checking on these recently returned neighbours. We will check to see if they are breaking any norm of quarantine. When all neighbours have the ‘snoop’ spyware no one keeps in touch with the recently returned folks. Whether they are showing up on the verandah to put their clothes out to dry, whether they open the window to let in some fresh air or whether they are opening the door to the delivery boy? No one goes out to help this family with their daily supplies. If even by mistake, someone from this family commit any one of the many cardinal sins – like stepping out of the house, or drying their hair on the balcony or take a smoke with the windows open, hell can break loose. Immediately all the alarms are set off by the ‘snoop’ spyware. Stories are made up and start spreading and some are even known to call the police.

In short if we have been infected by the ‘stigma’ or the ‘snoop’ bugs we develop many bad sectors and lose all capacity to reach out, to feel and to empathise. If ‘trojan’ bugs stay on with us, the society we will create, will be worrisome. We need to thoroughly scan ourselves to identify these and de-bug our systems before we reboot for the next stable system update.

Happy scanning, rebooting and recovery!

Abhijit Das