By Amar Yumnam
Leap frogging is a concept relating to the development process wherein innovations founded on newer and newer technologies allow the society to move ahead but what Manipur has been experiencing recently is one of reversing the earlier leaps. Though away far from Manipur, my mind has been fully occupied – both day and night – with the information on what has been happening day and nightin Manipur during the last nearly one-year. Thanks to the ingrained training and inculcated capacity of the discipline I have had the blessing of God and Goddess of Learning for learning for more than half a century, the effect of every social information is that whenever we hear the dynamics – causes, processes, gains, losses, property and life effects – spontaneously start appearing in our mind. What have been happening in Manipur are such that this has been very frequent and losing sleep too over them has been plenty over the past year. (In a society where the culturally inherited social character has been fast disappearing, it is equally possible that some groups claiming as some civil society organisation can come to me to clarify my claimof losing sleep within a specified time or otherwise unwanted consequences can come to my life and property; nobody can query about the level of knowledge, capacity of analysis and qualification about the members of the group for they stand for the “finality” in the society on any issue.)
While pondering on all these issues, I just got a copy of the latest book of Kaushik Basu – he was Chief Economist of the World Bank, Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India and more importantly he was in Manipur on my invitation while I was in the university in Canchipur. In the book titled Reason to be Happy: Why logical thinking is the key to a better life and published two weeks back, he writes on page 63 thus: “hate the sin, not the sinner…..in the context of the philosophy of determinism, not hating the sinner is not just a good strategy in the game of life, but it also stands to reason…during the COVID-19….Having to live with a heightened risk of hospitalisation and death, and having to decide whether to meet with friends, to travel or even to go to the neighbourhood café put a strain on our daily lives. Each decision became a reminder of the dangerous world we were navigating.”
This immediately put me back to what I had written onCovid 19, The Economy, The Commerce, The Society and The Polity: Business cam never be as UsualinApril 25, 2020 edition of the Imphal Review of Arts and Politics. In this I had talked of four critical implications of COVID 19 on humanity and I had mentioned of Behaviour Component, Governance Component, Demographic Component and Development Component. With the National Register of Citizens coming into place, Free Movement Regime across the international border coming into an end, fencing of the international border happening sooner than later, I find the relevance of these Components in this context as well. Further, I would definitely add three more components – the Geographic Component, the Institutional Component and the Social Component. The Geographic Component is being used in the Krugman sense of how the various qualitative and quantitative features of geography relate to development. The Institutional Component is
