Bobby Kataria is another you-tuber, with bulging muscles and a ready smile. He regularly posts his videos on YouTube. Last week he appeared, distressed and definitely Covid-19. The muscles seemed like they had lost the battle to the coronavirus. Yet the man managed to smile a wan warning. "Stick to the home friends. Hospitals are death traps." It's not known whether Kataria beat the virus, but it's dawning on more and more folks that healthcare professionals are a beaten lot and that the novel coronavirus doesn't differentiate between ornery denizens and corona warriors.

Add to that the fact that the legacy media and the new-fangled electronic opinion dispensers are too caught up in reporting the politics spawned by the pandemic, half of them sugarcoating the Modi Government's bitter truths while the other half drives home pointed nails into the Modi dispensation's coffin, which by the way is double its weight because it's a two-in-one box. Both Narendra & Amit would fit into it, their dead weight! This after 'Narendra & Amit' started trending on Twitter. No more addressing them Prime Minister and Home Minister, said a wisecrack and it stuck and struck home with a degree of finality.

The bottomline is there are all sorts of badasses plaguing the countryside along with the killer coronavirus which is mutating, mutating and mutating with double the mutant strength with every spring in the air. There is hushed talk that doctors and nurses of Delhi's jam-packed hospitals have given up the fight, so demoralized are they — they hadn't seen so many daily deaths at one go, day after day, night after night. Which brings us to the moot question whose fault is it afterall? There are blacksheep like in Bhagalpur everywhere, but what to do when the entire health infrastructure is rickety and creeking, like it's in India?

Fact is, it's clear as day follows night that right now, at this point in time, nobody ordinary citizen is overly bothered whether there should be a new revamped Central Vista or not. But it does rankle that VIPs and VVIPs don't have to scurry around scouting for hospital beds lugging oxygen cylinders on their backs. Like the common folk have to, and even then end up at crematoriums with dead loved ones. It's frustrating, and from frustration to murderous is but a short jump. The privileged rich and connected are being flown in air-ambulances to state-of-the-art hospitals in Hyderabad and Chennai.

The prestigious Lancet journal, which is in love with China, puts the blame for the second Covid wave squarely on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who should have seen the second wave coming. Now that he failed, he should at least sack his Principal Scientific Advisor, whose job it was to anticipate the second wave and suggest a modus operandi to tackle. Instead, the bright guy says the second wave is "ferocious" and we all should keep a lookout for a third wave. Great. Not only is Modi's top scientific trouser smug in his belief that he won't be sacked for his non-performance, but he's supremely confident that he can take Modi for a ride as and when it pleases him, piece of cake!

Can we safely conjecture that Modi surrounds himself with the half-baked, that all he has are quarter pennies? Take for instance his Health Minister, who had so coolly announced the demise of the coronavirus and then when confronted hadn't a word to deny, refute. He could have attempted to redeem himself with acting sheepish. But turned out he's another blacksheep in Modi's herd of ministers horsing around. It beggars the question: Is Narendra Modi a shephard, his Pied Piper days are definitely winding to a close?

Begs another question, several questions. Why does the man appear like he has nothing up his sleeve? It's plain as a billiards tabletop that barring 5 crore RSS, Arnab Goswami and Rajat Sharma, most of the folks in Bharatvarsh have no second opinion of Narendra Modi. It's also plain as Ganga-Yamuna tehzeeb that Modi's Varanasi days are not gonna last. Yet Modi remains complacent, calm. By now he should be running helter-skelter in total disarray like his vaccination drive. But no, the way Narendra and Amit are going about, it's like they have a couple of aces up their sleeves. What?

Come to think of it, for all that we know about them, the two are basically unknown quantity. We may think we have them both genome mapped, but the feeling lurks and persists that these two are beyond even the all-revealing narco test. If one is a master of all he surveys, the other is a master in the making. And then, to add to the tableaux, there's the gentleman in Gherua in Uttar Pradesh, another vastly unknown quantity. The three of them have a course charted. That much is for sure.

Assuming that Uttar Pradesh stays with the Yogi in 2022, Narendra Modi will have time on his side, till at least 2024. He has been proceeding with a Hindutva agenda and it would be foolish to expect that he and the forces behind him will give up the implementation of the agenda. People like him ride on the philosophy that "even this will pass". Besides, the world is his ally. The world will see to it that the coronavirus is defeated. Then it will be back to like before, to Hindu-Muslim, to CAA, to NRC; to Uniform Civil Code, to Mathura, Kashi and "Bhavya Mandir' in Ayodhya — 'Modi Hai Toh Sab Kuch Mumkin Hai'. Underestimating Modi will be the understatement of the decade! (IPA Service)