COVID-19 in India and resource sharing

The COVID-19 virus is the first time in history that many large, federal countries like India, US, Iran are facing threats in ALL their states (provinces).

Even during war time, India has never faced a threat all across. The Southern states are protected from war, and that is one reason India has moved certain strategic assets south.

This means that for OTHER crises, when one state or a few are affected, the central and the remaining states marshal resources and send it to the affected few states.

That is not going to work now.

Take ventilators or other medical supplies - since the COVID-19 threat is all across India, states are going to be in COMPETITION with each other to get such scarce resources. Instead of helping each other, states are going to try to grab what they can get.

Given the suspicions caused by our diversity, this means that the Central govt has to come up with a resource sharing mechanism NOW, RIGHT NOW, so that these allocations are fair and do not cause tensions. This means a conference with all states and a speeded up process similar to the Finance Commission allocations.

Inevitably, some states are going to accuse others of cornering resources; some are going to be accused of emergency funds for their own pet projects. This fight is going to be ugly. It is also going to be fought in social media/online news media with disinformation and divide our country.

It is critical that the Central govt call a conference on this allocation process with states.

Gravity as an Occult force

Recently after attending a couple of classes on Indian AstroMath (By Rangarathnam Gopu), I have slowly started understanding how big a shift heliocentrism was for science. (Heliocentrism is the idea that the sun is at the center and earth revolves around it)

From the time of Aristarchus of Samos, who only suspected it, to Copernicus, around 1800 years passed as great men struggled to comprehend that what is common sense to a normal human (that the sun goes around the earth) is completely false.

In this path to heliocentrism, many, many Islamic scholars contributed (Copernicus cites them).

Now, I have also started reading up on some philosophy from 500 years back - and it is clear that there was this same radical shift in the study of philosophy itself in that same time. The shift in science and philosophy came together, and the scientists were philosophers and the philosophers were scientists.

Thus, you come upon a major problem that Galileo and Newton faced in the 17th century - gravity was being suspected as a "force", but the word "force" scared the scientists, because it sounded occult. Even after Newton's time, it was felt that he had simply introduced not a mathematical idea, but a "magical" concept that simply explained away why objects with mass attracted each other.

This accusation that Newton had introduced a non-scientific idea prevailed for a 100 years after him!

So, just as scientists before Copernicus tried to understand the universe with sparse tools of observation, philosophers also tried to understand the world through pure metaphysical concepts - this is the thread that runs through Hindu philosophy and its treatment of causality to the Aristotelian concepts of form and essence.

Descartes, for example, tries to make sense of the universe through mind-matter dualism. Atoms themselves were a purely philosophical construct, with no basis in empirical reality.

This is useful to understand how people thought 500 years back - it is difficult to wrap our minds around this, given our education and "prior" knowledge, but we have to situate ourselves as a person without these modern tools and try to understand the science and philosophy of the ancients.

This task is not easy, but it is very stimulating.