Guest blog by Vidur Dindayal: “We are a community – new order after pandemic”

The coronavirus has brought people together. The best of our qualities as human beings is at the fore. Here in the UK, it is wonderful to see the community spirit in our street and throughout the country.

We are at the cusp of a historic change to a new order. The freedom which we enjoyed for centuries where everyone is for themselves will give way to a new order where all of us in a country will see ourselves as one community.      

Th virus is being fought at all levels. Scientists work intensely to find a vaccine to free us from the virus. It is being fought by everyone pulling together with the main fighters on the front line, the doctors, nurses, carers, and supporting staff of the National Health Service, backed by the emergency services and the uniformed services.

Every Thursday evening, we cheer for all of our National Health Service and emergency services. We do so with genuine praise and gratitude for their commitment and dedication to fighting the battle with the virus and for caring our sick and weak.

After the end of the war 75 years ago, a brave bold and far seeing change was brought about in the UK from a deep sense of fairness, equality, kindness and compassion, with the creation of the National Health Service, the Welfare state, free secondary education and new housing policy.

People had lost many relations during the war. They had suffered much grief, had been deprived of much during the war, so they felt they were not going to put up with all that grief and deprivation anymore.

The war had changed Britain. People wanted a fairer society. Teenagers whose only hope for work was going down the coal mines could then go to high school and better their education, and even go on to University.

With this pandemic, there is that mood again of not putting up with deprivation. There must be change. The pandemic has caused fundamental changes in the way we live. Things are unlikely to revert to ‘business as usual’. Like those historic changes after the war, the new order will be living as a community, not to see people as us and them but as one of us. Human values of fairness, equality, and kindness will tailor our affairs.    

We will enjoy the freedom to live how we want, except that it will be balanced with the responsibility to look after the weak and sick and unfortunate.

The freedom where everyone is for themselves is no compliment to a society which is rich and grown up. That freedom even in the jungle allows for co-existence for millennia. How else do we see in one jungle, the variety of flora and fauna, birds and beasts thriving. They take out from the environment only that which they need and leave enough for everyone else.

In the new order of living as a community, we will enjoy more freedom by sharing what we have with others in need. It is enlightened self-interest, but it is also human, pure and simple. Without legal compulsion, we are by our nature superbly generous and charitable. The Red Cross, Oxfam, British Legion, Cancer Research, Children’s hospital, the remarkable support given to food banks, up and down the country, and many other charities are testimony to our human values of kindness and generosity.  

Long may our community spirit thrive and prosper. There is hope for better if we think like one big family and engage the community spirit to address our social problems of crime, want and shameful inequality.

I grew up in a sugar plantation long ago in Guyana where there was that community spirit. I often look up on it as a model of people living as one big family. Most of the old people had been descendants of immigrants from India.     

We celebrated the arrival on 5 May 1838 of the first of our ancestors from India who came as indentured labourers to British Guiana. Thousands eventually came to Guyana, Trinidad, Surinam and the entire Caribbean and they prospered.  

Our Ancestors broke new ground in a strange land and laid solid foundations for the significant achievements of their descendants.

The energy behind Indo Caribbean achievement has been the basic human values of their ancestors. They came from villages of India. With little formal education, let alone high school learning, they lived by those values including:          

Saving. Save for a rainy day. Waste not want not.

Sacrifice. Parents would sacrifice anything for their children.

Suffering. Acceptance of pain & pleasure equally.  

Contentment with basic minimum to live on. 

Society. Duty to support it.   

Gratitude where you live. Put something back into it.

Joint family. Everyone in the family supporting one another.   

Significant in their life was they all lived like one large family. Family life and kinship are linked to the spectacular progress of well-known Indo-Caribbean families.  

The original immigrants had built up strong relationships with their fellows who shared the hazards of travelling for weeks on the ship and then deposited in the sugar plantations in a foreign land, stranger than their wildest dreams. They were called Jahajis. i.e. those who shared travel on the ship.  

The Jahaji relationship was like one large family, meeting joy and sorrow together, helping one another in every step in their life. They addressed one another as brother or sister, I saw them as uncle or aunty. No one was a looked upon as a stranger, no distance between people, no anonymity.

Historic social reforms had been made in the UK after the war. These are firmly embedded in life in the UK. Not all societies are like this, but change to living as one community is nigh with kindness, pulling together, and human values which make our life better.

We reflect on life today, where wealth is necessary, but cannot itself replace kindness, care, a helping hand, and support. We are humans and in the new order, when all else is found wanting, human values of love, kindness, compassion, and support will bring a smile.