Category: Issue 7

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Issue 7

Taking from the Rich: Reddit, GameStop and the Consequences of Greed

Near the middle of 2019, a Reddit user, known as “Roaring Kitty” boasted his $53,000 investment in “GameStop” a declining video game company. GameStop bought and sold video games, and it isn’t hard to see why that kind of model seems unsustainable in the streaming and digital age. u/RoaringKitty made his post on a subReddit known as “r/WallStreetBets” henceforth known as WSB. Every commenter on WSB cried out that this investment was foolhardy, that GameStop was dying but u/RoaringKitty paid them no heed and continued to keep his investment there. Today, that $53,000 stake is worth $48 Million. How did this happen? 

To begin, we need to understand a few terms. 

What is a share? 

When a company is formed, it’s corpus consists of a set of discrete units. The owners of these discrete units are shareholders and become direct stakeholders invested in the company. In the case of GameStop, there are roughly 65 million shares up for grabs. 

What is a short? 

A short is a financial action one can take concerning shares. While the obvious way of profiting off of stocks is to buy some shares, wait for the prices to rise, sell and profit off of the differences, there is a means of profiting off of the fall in the price of a share. The way to do this is through “shorting”.

What one does is, when they anticipate that the price of a company’s shares is going to drop in value, they “borrow” shares from shareholders, sell them at current market prices, then once the price drops, they buy the shares back and “return” them, and keep the difference for themselves. Now, when one shorts a given company’s stock, it is legally required to eventually return the borrowed shares. This means they have to buy back the shares, regardless of what they cost. 

In the case of GameStop, hedge funds (financial institutions that profit through the buying and selling of stocks and shares) shorted 140% of GameStop’s shares. How do you short 40% more shares than those that exist? Well, that’s actually not too wild. Essentially, shares can be double-counted. Suppose I buy a share in GameStop and then lend it to a broker who intends to short it. This broker sells it to another customer, named say, Saman. Now, to Saman, this is just another share, there is no association with me, so she can further lend the share to someone else who could short it. This way, we can have over a 100% short interest. 

What did u/RoaringKitty do?

Now, u/RoaringKitty didn’t just brag about a weird investment, he noticed something nobody else did: GameStop wasn’t a dying company. GameStop had reasonably large cash reserves, they didn’t have much debt, and with the release of the new PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series, the chain of stores was doing alright. 

Roaring Kitty started talking about his investment on YouTube, Reddit, and TikTok, and people began to notice. Specifically, Michael Burry. Some of you might know him from Christian Bale’s portrayal of him in The Big Short, but for those who don’t, Burry was one of the first people to realize that there was a crisis imminent before the 2008 Economic Crisis and made a massive profit off of it. Burry, at last count, made a 1400% profit off of his investment in GameStop in just under 5 months. 

This discourse on GameStop’s financials, as well as public filings showing massive short interests from various hedge funds like Citron and Melvin Capital, became the seeds of a perfect storm. u/RoaringKitty mobilized r/WallStreetBets with the information that GameStop was viable fuelling thousands of members of the subReddit to buy millions of shares. This artificially drove the price of GameStop stock up hundreds of dollars and decimated the short position of various hedge funds. Melvin Capital lost nearly $4 billion throughout January. 

While initially, buying GameStop stock was sound financial advice, eventually anti-billionaire, anti-hedge fund rhetoric swept the subReddit, and users decided that keeping the stock was now a moral crusade to crush meddling Wall Street titans. You can find posts like this across the website describing their hatred for Wall Street money movers, and this no doubt fueled the stock buying. Eventually, various influencers, including Elon Musk joined the bandwagon, advocating to buy GameStop and crush the short sellers. Musk specifically dislikes shorting since firms have tried to short Tesla several times over the years. 

Robinhood, a free, fee-less trading platform began restricting trading GameStop stock, to avoid “volatility” in the stock market. Now, as surprising as it may sound, Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump Jr. all cried out that this was anti-competitive and anti-capitalist, you’d never expect to see the three of them agree on anything, let alone the free market. Robinhood was only the first of several services to restrict trading, an act that has led to several class-action lawsuits. This leaves a valuable question on the table, who gets to truly “regulate” the market? Why is social market manipulation “volatility” while a few billionaires doing it is a “hustle”? The actual nature of power within market structures has been exposed, and it cannot be allowed to fade from public memory. The “free” market is a selectively free market. 

Now, as trading continues it is to be seen which forces buckle first, the Redditors, or the hedge funds. As the value fluctuates, there are ripple effects across the industry. This entire incident is also provoking a series of questions about the power of social media. A user on Reddit mobilized millions of dollars through thousands of small traders, and apps like Parler managed to mobilize thousands to storm the US Capitol. While one shouldn’t conflate the two events, there needs to be cognizance of how these networks hold the power to organize people in ways that the people are not prepared for. But beyond that, the story is still unfolding, and we need to ask ourselves, who wins at the end of this? How do we even imagine “winning” in this scenario? And, where does this leave us? 

Vibhor is a third-year economics major, and frequent Redditor, with an interest in economic history, behavioural science and decentralised systems. He is a frequent critic of the free market and enjoys reading about market failure and similar shenanigans.

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Issue 7

Road to Recovery: A Conversation on Covaxin with Prof. Gautam Menon

What exactly do clinical trials for a new vaccine involve? 

The first step after a potential vaccine is developed is to try it out on animals to check that it is not toxic and that it leads to an immune response. If this step is successful, the next stage is to move to human trials, where these preliminary trials are called phase 1 trials.

In such trials, healthy volunteers (typically 20-50 in number) are injected with one of a range of possible doses of the vaccine, to determine the optimal and safe dose, starting from very small doses. Whether the vaccine elicits an immune response is also verified. In phase 2 trials, the immune response is examined further, and questions of side effects and safety are also explored in a larger group of volunteers, typically more than 100.

Finally, phase 3 trials involve administering the vaccine to a much larger group, often tens of thousands of people, selected to be representative of the population. These trials are called “randomized control trials”. In these trials, about half the participants enrolled are given a placebo, something that is harmless to the body, while the other half is given the vaccine. No one knows, not even the doctors administering it, whether the injection contains a placebo or the real thing.

In India, emergency use authorization has been granted to two vaccines: Covishield, made by the Serum Institute of India and Covaxin, made by Bharat Biotech.

Since Covaxin didn’t complete its phase 3 trials and publish them, what can we confidently say about its efficacy? 

At the moment we can say little since there simply is no data yet. In the much smaller phase-1 and phase-2 trials, the vaccine elicited a robust immune response, making antibodies against the virus. The vaccine was also shown to be safe in appropriate doses. It is based on an inactivated whole-virus vaccine platform which is well-understood. However, it is important to understand that efficacy—whether a vaccine works well at preventing you from getting the disease under ideal conditions—is not a simple and immediate consequence of immunogenicity, the ability of a vaccine to provoke an immune response. That is why we need phase 3 trials in the first place.

Is there a broader misunderstanding of immunogenicity and efficacy? What is the difference and why is it important? 

A vaccine should certainly provoke a response from the immune system. That’s central to how vaccines function. But whether it works in preventing people from getting the disease – protective immunity – is a harder question and there are a few things that could go wrong. One extreme case is that getting vaccinated might, paradoxically, increase your chances of severe disease, through what is called ADE or antibody-dependent enhancement. Another possibility is a vaccine-associated enhanced respiratory disease, in which antibodies induced by the vaccine bind with viruses and form immune complexes that clog the lungs. These are possibilities that a phase-3 trial should rule out.

How is Covaxin going to complete phase 3 trials?

What should happen, in principle, is the following: The scientists running the trial will wait till a certain number of people, a number pre-approved in the trial protocol, within the group that received an injection, are diagnosed with COVID-19. They then go back and check whether these people belonged to the group that was administered the placebo or the actual vaccine. If there are many more cases in the placebo group than the vaccine group than can be accounted for by chance, that suggests that the vaccine works in protecting against developing the actual disease.

The problem is that it may take some time to reach this stage of having a predetermined number infected with the disease. Since most people develop no or only mild symptoms of the disease, they may not notice they have been infected.

A second problem is that phase-3 trials are being done in a background where a good number of people have already been infected in the past, so are immune to the disease for at least some time, as far as we know. These people won’t develop the disease even if they encounter an infected person.  

Finally, currently in India, all this is happening in the background of a steadily decreasing number of new cases. This makes it harder to have new infections in the trial group.

Why aren’t people given a choice on which vaccine they would prefer? 

The government, which is, after all, making these vaccines available for free at this point, may have wanted to ensure that they did not appear to be favouring one over the other when granting emergency-use approval. Perhaps there is also an element of national pride in this, in that Covaxin is a fully indigenous vaccine while Covishield is the result of a collaboration with international groups, at Oxford University and the pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca.

What, according to you, is the biggest health concern with not having any efficacy data on Covaxin? 

Whenever one is administering a vaccine to a healthy person, one would like to know that it has been worth it. Does the vaccine, for example, provide protection against the disease to more than 50% of the population it is administered to? A phase-3 trial, precisely because it is so large and planned as a randomised control trial, is a good way to ask this question as well as to look out for possible rare but serious side-effects of being vaccinated.

Would it have been a better move to rollout Covaxin after phase 3 clinical trial data was published? Why do you think it was encouraged over other alternatives? 

It would have been better to rollout Covaxin after the efficacy data became available, in my opinion. Data demonstrating good efficacy and safety, which could have taken another month or so to obtain, would have spoken for itself.

Of course, these decisions have to be made based on available information as well as projections for what might happen in the future, such as new variants that are more transmissible. There are certainly cases where granting emergency use authorisation might have been justified. This is why scientists as well as the lay public need to understand the basis on which these decisions were made.

The committee that approved Covaxin distribution may have had data that was shown to it that suggested that it was efficacious. We don’t know because neither the names of the committee members nor the minutes of their deliberations are available to us.

Transparency should always be a central consideration in such matters, especially since you will be vaccinating people who are healthy and you don’t want to compromise on safety.

Considering how the vaccination drive is going right now, do you think vaccine hesitancy is slowly eroding and that target numbers will be met? 

Yes, the numbers of those getting vaccinated each day are steadily increasing. That is a good sign. Unlike in the USA and some other developed countries, there is no strong anti-vaccination movement in this country and people are accustomed to large-scale immunization programs, such as the pulse polio campaign.

Do you think the vaccine rollout should’ve been critiqued more or less than it was by the Indian scientific community? What could have been different?

I think the sections of the scientific community that critiqued the Covaxin rollout did the right thing. Prof. Shahid Jameel of Ashoka University and Prof. Gagandeep Kang of the CMC Vellore, in particular, were sane voices in this, pointing out gently, but firmly, the need to stick to established procedure. One has to ensure that the public does not feel that they would be guinea pigs. Several fellows of the Indian Academy of Science also signed a document expressing their concern.

I was dismayed at the counter signature campaign, supporting the Covaxin rollout, from a group of 49 medical doctors and scientists. Their arguments made little sense to me.

Can anything be said about whether the current vaccine candidates can be effectively used for the new strains of the virus?

There is some encouraging news of the effectiveness of some of the international vaccines against the new strains, although perhaps not at the same level. Bharat Biotech has claimed very recently that its Covaxin was effective against the UK variant of the virus. Our understanding is rapidly evolving.

Do you think that the overall vaccine development process has changed in the course of the global effort in formulating a COVID-19 vaccine?

Absolutely. I thought, as many others did, that a period of 18 months to two years would be the minimum time required for a vaccine to be distributed. That we managed to do this in less than a year is a remarkable achievement. Without our ever-improving knowledge of both basic and applied science, this would simply have been impossible. Indeed, it would have been impossible even a decade ago.

I am, in many ways, proud of what India has achieved. The Serum Institute of India, located in Pune, is the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer. Bharat Biotech, the manufacturers of Covaxin, has a manufacturing plant that is the largest of its kind in the Asia-Pacific region. It is a respected company which exports therapeutics and vaccines across the world. India itself produces 60% of global vaccines. The Director-General of the WHO commented recently that “…the production capacity of India is one of the best assets the world has today”.

As an Indian, this does make me very happy.

Gautam Menon is Professor of Physics and Biology at Ashoka University as well as Professor of Theoretical Physics and Computational Biology at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai. He works in biophysics as well as in, more recently, the modelling of  infectious disease.

We publish all articles under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivatives license. This means any news organisation, blog, website, newspaper or newsletter can republish our pieces for free, provided they attribute the original source (OpenAxis).

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Issue 7

“Mark as Read” to “Mark has Read”: Privacy Policies in India

There are three imponderables when it comes to Privacy: the definition of privacy in today’s data-is-the-new-oil world, how to balance the desires of the individual and the powers-that-be (government or local law enforcement), and how to actually implement and enforce these ideas, once we’ve come up with them. In short, it wouldn’t be too wrong to say that we don’t really know what we’re doing when it comes to privacy!

Further, there’s usually a dichotomy proposed between privacy and security: you can have privacy, but that means criminals/terrorists would be able to operate without the government being able to track them. So, if you want to have security from all these evil people, you must consent to let the government snoop on your data as well.

This is actually a common thing: to protect the population from the wiles of food producers, the government sets up certain standards that these producers must obey. The government may send inspectors to check upon the processes followed, and then punish producers who do not conform. Here, however, every single one of us is a producer.

Fortunately (or otherwise) this relentless production of data by individuals is mediated by companies like Facebook, who collate and process this data, profiting from the detailed profiles they build of us in the process. So, it might be possible to regulate things simply by applying the regulations on these corporations instead of at an individual level. But it also means that there are now two entities (albeit with somewhat different incentives) who may want to read what we write, i.e., the government and the corporation. One thing is very clear: individual-level policies are insufficient. Most people do not (and cannot be expected to) have a deep understanding of privacy issues – just like we don’t all have a deep understanding of food safety norms. Some kind of aggregated negotiation tactic, then, appears to be the only solution.

Given that the government (an entity interested in seeing our data) is the one representing the population in this negotiation, civil society must be extremely vigilant about what the details are. Many people (loosely) propose some structure of the following nature: private messages between individuals must remain secret, both from the government and the corporation. However, if the government comes to the corporation with a warrant, the latter must hand over the data. This last bit, of course, is impossible in an “end-to-end encrypted” system, where only the sender and receiver can read information.

WhatsApp’s recent change is an interesting nuance in this 40,000-ft view. Your private messages in WhatsApp are still end-to-end encrypted and unreadable to anyone but the parties directly involved: nothing has changed on that front. What many may not have noticed, is that WhatsApp actually makes two different apps: one for private use, and one for businesses. WhatsApp’s new policy allows them to look only at communications with these business accounts.

Note that WhatsApp could already look at the metadata: they would know, for example, that you had been chatting with a number of mattress companies (but might not know what kind of mattresses you were looking for). Facebook could then advertise mattresses on your feed. With this new policy, WhatsApp can share data about your interactions with business accounts, so that Facebook can find and suggest the exact kind of mattress you were looking for. As far as changes in privacy go, it’s actually rather minor. Your private messages are just as private as before.

As discussed above, even an end-to-end encrypted system can reveal a lot about one’s preferences and behaviour; this is actually the main difference between WhatsApp and Signal. They use the exact same set of encryption protocols; WhatsApp provides more services (e.g., it is rolling out payments in India), but retains metadata. Signal retains no metadata whatsoever. It just knows the time you last logged in and some other basic information, nothing more, and backups are encrypted. In either case, your actual chats are end-to-end encrypted and cannot be seen by anyone else; this is with the notable exception of backups: unencrypted backups (WhatsApp does not have an option to encrypt) can be read by Google or Apple (and thus by a government with a warrant).

Any state regulation on these encryption and privacy policies would be incredibly difficult, and that’s without getting into the international nature of the problem (what happens with software written in Germany that facilitates a chat between a Japanese citizen and an Australian citizen, with the latter physically residing in India?). I think the short answer is “non-starter”. 

Perhaps the nearest we can get is a set of minimum standards, some rules about consent, and privacy scores. Such consent rules are also hard to frame, e.g., “a corporation cannot access any data belonging to a user without direct, time-limited consent, with sufficient granularity (not all-or-nothing options)”, but we have a lot of good lawyers who I am sure can do a much better job of this than I! In the short term, however, the best idea is almost certainly privacy scores, calculated by an independent government agency, providing something like a star rating to companies operating in India: this could be one way to provide citizens with the information they need to choose what is right for them. 

Debayan Gupta is currently an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Ashoka University, where he teaches a course on security and privacy as well as an introductory programming class. He is also a visiting professor and research affiliate at MIT and MIT-Sloan. 

We publish all articles under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivatives license. This means any news organisation, blog, website, newspaper or newsletter can republish our pieces for free, provided they attribute the original source (OpenAxis).

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Issue 7

The Cost of the Cure: Understanding the Implications of India’s COVID-19 Inoculation Drive

Union Minister Amit Shah’s bold call for a duel to challenge vaccine skeptics came exactly a week after the Indian government’s inoculation program against COVID-19 was launched on 16th January 2021. The ambitious plan aims to vaccinate 300 million healthcare and frontline workers in its first phase using the vaccine derived from the Oxford-AstraZeneca candidate AZD-1222, dubbed Covishield in India, and Covaxin, produced by Hyderabad-based biotechnology company, Bharat Biotech and the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR).

Despite initial optimism, the program has witnessed low turnout rates, due to widespread misinformation and safety concerns. The root cause of doubt about the program stems from the announcement by the Drug Controller General of India (DCGI) on 3rd January 2021, when Covaxin and Covishield were given emergency use approvals. While the approval for Covishield was unsurprising, given its established efficacy in all three phases of trials abroad, it was the seemingly hasty rollout of Covaxin that caused a stir. 

Criticism of the vaccine primarily focused on the absence of Phase 3 clinical trial data, since the trials have not yet concluded. The initial backlash against the approval of Covaxin was met with officials responsible for India’s COVID-19 response claiming that it would be used as a “back up”, in case of the need for extra doses given the emergence of the new UK strain of the virus. Moreover, it was also made clear that Covaxin would only be administered in “clinical trial mode”, where its recipients would be asked for their consent and proper monitoring for side-effects would follow. 

However, this stance towards the vaccine changed a few days later, when it was announced that both vaccine candidates will be treated at par with one another.  According to Dr Samiran Panda, a scientist at the ICMR, the circulation of the vaccine essentially implied a single-arm clinical trial, where a placebo wouldn’t be used and results wouldn’t be published under a peer-reviewed journal. Moreover, vaccine recipients would not have the option to choose between Covaxin and Covishield. It was this sudden change of positions that raised concerns. 

Consent, Choice and the State

The question about individual choice and consent is critical to the discourse around the inoculation mission. The lack of choice between vaccine candidates has affected turnout rates with only around 56% of eligible individuals getting vaccinated due to concerns among healthcare and frontline workers about the controversy surrounding its fast-paced rollout.

Ethical concerns regarding consent plague the program – should recipients, who aren’t willing participants of a research study, not be allowed to choose between two vaccines that differ in terms of proven efficacy and safety? Given the major difference between the vaccine candidates, how can consent retain its true value when it directly robs an individual of their agency to make personal medical decisions? Most crucially, should the state have the authority to directly or indirectly force the hand of citizens in making informed medical choices?

The decision of the rollout of Covaxin under current conditions seems even more dubious at a time when essential workers are invaluable and at the highest risk of contracting the virus. 

Shifting Positions and Unwelcome Surprises

The behaviour of the Indian state and its important bodies in relation to its treatment of Covaxin is also perplexing. The very approval of a vaccine that hasn’t yet completed Phase 3 clinical trials raises alarm. The third phase of trials is critical since it provides for the closest possible model of how a vaccine candidate will behave when administered to a large population.

The vaccine’s intended use has also been disputed. The DCGI had claimed that it would be administered in an open-label clinical trial to ascertain its efficacy against the UK strain of the virus. In direct contradiction, Bharat Biotech managing director Krishna Ella has stated that there was no “confirmatory data” indicating that Covaxin works against it, and has suggested that this form of vaccine circulation was sprung upon him by the government.

The sheer disconnect between the understanding of India’s major regulatory body and the vaccine manufacturer not only is a matter of concern but also sets a worrisome precedent. Moreover, the suggestion that Bharat Biotech was unaware of the government’s expectation of the vaccine’s use can also lead to long-lasting implications for public trust in regulatory bodies and affect state standards for treatment approvals in the future. 

 Vaccine Diplomacy and Anti-Nationals
The past year has been marked by governmental positions that encourage the idea of India as a major player in the global response against COVID-19. The consequence of the same is the attachment of national pride to India’s vaccine response.  Hence, in the face of concerns about the vaccine, critics of the vaccination program have been liberally deemed ‘anti-national’, an all-too-familiar narrative that conveniently sensationalizes every aspect of the matter except its core problems.
Given that Covishield is relatively cheaper than Covaxin, it is important to question the government’s decision to purchase and circulate a vaccine that is yet to produce Phase 3 trial data. Moreover, India has only exported doses of Covishield so far despite having purchased 3.85 million doses of Covaxin, which is peculiar given the government’s otherwise confident domestic narrative around the vaccine. These facts paint a murky picture – one where India seems to be balancing domestic needs and international ambitions, with the former placed in relatively more uncertain territory than the latter.It is necessary to establish that the crux of the concerns surrounding Covaxin pertains to the confusion around its intended usage, authorization prior to completing Phase 3 trials, and the issues of recipient consent and choice. A pandemic is the worst possible time to sow skepticism around medicine. At the same time however, it is important to recognize that the consequences of any missteps in approval or administration of treatments can trigger mass disillusionment from life-saving scientific treatments for years to come. Given as things stand in India, one can only wait and observe what unfolds.

Aarohi Sharma is a Psychology student at Ashoka University. Her academic interests primarily focus on the intersection of politics and psychology in society.

We publish all articles under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivatives license. This means any news organisation, blog, website, newspaper or newsletter can republish our pieces for free, provided they attribute the original source (OpenAxis).

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Issue 7

Museums of Democracy: How the Central Vista Project highlights the Importance of Curating History

This is primarily because any history we read, hear, or watch, is refracted, it is shaped by the person or thought process that is engaged in the exercise of compiling it. The difference between History with the capital ‘H’ and history as everything that happened in the past is crucial. The former is carefully picked out from the latter – a series of events  and artefacts chosen to tell a story. The historian then carefully selects these ‘chosen ones’ to help shape the narrative they wish to see furthered; a narrative that is intrinsically based on the politics of the day.

The question raised then is why should someone care about this act of selection now? The answer is simple, everyday instances like the renaming of roads, the demolition of buildings and the rebuilding of common spaces reinforce this act of selection. One such undertaking that makes one stop and think about this is the Central Vista Redevelopment Project.

The project aims to renovate 86 acres of land in New Delhi, including historical buildings like the Parliament House, the Rashtrapati Bhawan, and the India Gate. Moreover, the National Museum is also set to be taken down and rebuilt where the current North and South Blocks stand in the Central Secretariat. The area, associated with affluence and political power is commonly called Lutyens Delhi after the architects Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker who designed it when the capital was shifted to Delhi in 1911 under the British rule.

Ever since its announcement in September 2019 by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, the project has come under scrutiny for violations of municipal and environmental law as well as change in land use. Following this, the Supreme Court gave it the green light in January 2021. Close to a month prior to January, Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation of a new Parliament building under a Hindu ceremony. The ceremony itself was allowed when the government reassured the court that no demolition or construction would begin until the final decision had been received. 

The focus of this article, however, is to draw attention to something that seems fairly inconspicuous at first but can have lasting impacts on how we associate our present with our past. The act of demolition and consequently rebuilding employs the historical process mentioned earlier – that of selection and by extension erasure of what gets chosen to be rebuilt and featured. With the National Museum for instance, the idea is that North and South Blocks will be able to house more historical artefacts. However, which artefacts are highlighted and how are questions that remain to be answered. 

The entire episode reminds me of something Susan Sontag said in relation to photography – “[To photograph] means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge – and, therefore, like power.” While she was talking about the act of framing something within photographic borders, the idea at its crux seems especially relevant here – when somebody controls the framing of the past, they wield power. Perhaps, therefore, the same self-reflectivity is required for the curation of renovated spaces.

While the words ‘heritage’, ‘redevelopment’ and ‘conservation’ paint rosy pictures in one’s mind about the building of new spaces, they actually point to the larger question of historical knowledge production. Buildings and architecture has always been used to assert power, symbolise progress and display grandeur. The act of rebuilding is not unique either, as history is replete with examples of the same. That being said, the question, especially with an edifice like the National Museum is its current housing of historical artefacts, and the process of curation that will go into the remade property. 

While the aforementioned already acts as a repository of history, the other buildings like the current Parliament House are receptacles of public memory of post-colonial India while themselves being colonial products. The Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) is a prime example of a building set to be taken down which is associated with the memory of a former Prime Minister. Founded by Kapila Vatsyayan, it is a space where art has found expression during nationally significant events. Keeping the relevance of these in mind therefore becomes important as contemporary history may be memory for now, but it will not remain so for the coming decades. This highlights the importance of preserving not just historical remains but also elements of post-independence public memory that have not become canonical History yet.

Preserving public memory, if nothing else, can create context. They point to the uncomfortable understanding that even if features do not fit proposed narratives, they cannot be razed. For instance, the reason behind the decision to withdraw the candidature of colonial Delhi and Shahjahanabad as UNESCO World Heritage sites in 2014 has been traced by some to their legacies rooted in the Mughal period and the colonial era. While the legacies may cause discomfort to some, their significance cannot be dismissed.

The Central Vista Project sheds light on the importance of history and public memory. The fact is that the past cannot speak for itself. Whatever the past says, it does through the actors who consolidate it. The thing to keep in mind then in light of the project is this – demolishing heritage buildings should not open up the passageway to raze history.

Sanya is a student of History, International Relations and Media Studies at Ashoka University.

We publish all articles under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivatives license. This means any news organisation, blog, website, newspaper or newsletter can republish our pieces for free, provided they attribute the original source (OpenAxis).

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Issue 7

Pets of the Pandemic

Human beings, as one knows, are social beings; be it with a fellow human or an animal. This inherent quality along with the advancement of technology and media has facilitated the sociality of a person. In the era of the internet, we are up to date and in touch with more friends, family and acquaintances than ever before. However, the year 2020 took such a turn and brutally limited this inherent sociality to being social in a room and connected through a screen. One was not only isolated but in-person social interaction also meant putting oneself and the people around at risk.

With almost completing a year amidst the pandemic, conversations around mental health concerns have seen a significant rise that has a correlational if not causal relationship with the pandemic. It is not uncommon that the pandemic, quarantine and the lockdown harboured a lot of feelings of uncertainty, isolation and loneliness. While a person to person interaction might have been risky, a number of people turned to the companionship of a pet. 

Historically, humans have always been a part of a culture of integrating animals within their lifestyle as both parties have been present in close physical proximity. Traditionally, animals such as horses, cows, dogs, etc. were domesticated to acquire goods such as dairy, meat, security etc; thus, they had a use-value. While these animals were resourceful, over time, this culture of domestication branched out into what a layperson would see as keeping a ‘pet’ in present times. One could see the emergence of keeping pets for companionship, comfort and support. A variety of research sheds light on the human-animal interaction, and one such research explores this bond through the Pet Effect. This effect addresses the impact of the symbiotic relationship of love, affection that the pet and owner share, that significantly contributes to each parties’ physical, emotional and mental well-being. A survey was conducted in 2016, which reported that 74% of the 2000 pet owners, felt that there was a significant improvement in their mental and social well-being once they acquired a pet.

Hence, to seek comfort in these unprecedented times, various individuals who could afford to, adopted a pet. If one would’ve stepped into a park in May, one would have noticed a good deal of what are called the ‘Pets of the Pandemic’. With the lockdown pushing work culture from in-office to a work from home format, not only did a pet provide companionship but also a positive and meaningful presence within the home environment. Owners could now fully distract themselves from the uncertainty and invest in attending to their pet and also indulging in physical exercise by taking them out for walks.

While pets may have been the solution to our loneliness, many have chosen to ignore the  impact of the pandemic on our four-legged companions? Research suggests that for newly born and adopted pets, socialisation is crucial within their first three months. The environment that a pet spends time in plays an essential role in their development. However, due to the pandemic, various pets like dogs and cats have spent a large portion of their initial months indoors. This leads to exposing pets to two pertinent issues: difficulty in adjusting to new environments and socialising and developing separation anxiety. 

Gradual exposure to society and socialization is an important part of taking care of and training pets, especially for a puppy. This training ensures that the puppy grows to be a dog that is comfortable with other people, animals and new environments and does not develop unnecessary fears and phobias. 

Furthermore, stemming from the same environment is the issue of separation anxiety. Separation anxiety is often noticed in dogs and is described as the dog displaying distressed behaviour when its’ guardian is about to leave the house. Distressed behaviour could look different for each dog, however, some common indicators are agitation, being upset, uneasy or restless and seeming depressed. Dogs suffering from separation anxiety bark and howl when they are left alone or cause destruction in the house, often causing self-injury and in some cases, make an attempt to escape. 

When we are experiencing distressed, often restoring to a pet for comfort is extremely normal. With owners spending 24×7 time with their pets, the latter have become a coping mechanism for many. The line between this mutually beneficial relationship and co-dependency has blurred during the pandemic. So the most important question to raise is what happens once the guardians move back to their 9-5 in-office lifestyle? How does the pet respond to getting all the constant attention for almost 11 months to transitioning back to the time when they were not? How does the owner resort to separating themselves from their pet, and find other mechanisms to cope with stress?

These are questions that one is yet to answer. 

Vanishree is currently pursuing Psychology and Sociology at Ashoka University. Vani enjoys cooking in her free time. 

Picture Credits: Sunehra Bhatura

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