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Of Demagogue and frondeurs..

Crisis and Conflicts are moments of truth for any society. Not only because it deconstructs the secondary paraphrasings like the economy, but because also puts to test the social machinery. Modern emergencies have explored a new non-natural side to calamities, like nuclear meltdown and bio-hazards amongst others. For a common man, the question often strips down to survival, and decisions become too personal. However, for the larger social institutions, namely the government, the question is more pressing and answers quite unclear.

A crisis is the points where wealth proves to be blubber of protection. The rich are inevitably the fortunate. They have access to services and getaways, a poor can never fathom of. Adding to the misery is that as the focus shits to the exigency, the common welfare services too take a hit. However, for the rich, most of the affairs are generally from their pocket. Because the untrained human response to panic is mostly the same, the rich tend to even go out of the way to hoard in the essentials causing a larger pinch in the scanty resources. The trained brains, at times, can be more dangerous too. If you can handle panic and have made your fortune out of it; You know how basically squeeze the most out of vulnerable hands.

Government is mostly run by people's men. Essentially sweet -talkers, with street smart skills. In most cases, they are efficient managers and manipulators of public opinion. But in a contingency, it is not only the opinions that they have to take control of. This is where the professionals come into play. But they don't have the impeccable social skills of swaying away. They speak the bitter facts; talk of hard-hitting plans. The world of engineering has little room for negotiation. This becomes a nightmare for the policymakers. The setting up of a discussion table between the ones who hold the power and those who have the knowledge is the first step to successful mitigation of the crisis.

The problem here is two-fold, first that professionals are not actively associated with politics, therefore they are mostly left out of the primary actions of relief, which have the most significant of the outcome. Professionals are brought in at a time when the fire is raging and there is not even enough water left. This implies they have to work with more constraints. The second problem is with authority. Although it sounds fair to have the action team of only doctors to treat coronavirus; in reality most of the teams are bureaucrats. The reason being, politicians work only with the incentive that they are credited for the work they do. Collective political altruism is only a made-up word.

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