Stolen kisses are sweet, forbidden love sweeter

What does one say about a scientist who invites his married lover to his home for… well…? The old-fashioned would grimace. The libertarian and the libertine would laugh it off; they may just quote some poem—something like …<em>koi Laila kisi deewar se roki na gai</em>… from the famous filmy quwwali <em>Na to karvaan ki talaash hai…</em>

And what if it happened in the middle of a corona-triggered nationwide lockdown? Irresponsible, everybody would say. But what if the scientist happens to be the one whose scaremongering and dangerous counsel engendered the monstrosity called lockdown? Stupendous hypocrisy of a megalomaniac who should not have been taken seriously in the first place: this would be the normal reaction. Which means reaction of everybody except those on the Left.

“The scientist nicknamed ‘Professor Lockdown’ who convinced Boris Johnson to impose the coronavirus shutdown has sensationally quit his government role after it was revealed he flouted the restrictions he helped craft by holding secret trysts with his married lover,” Daily Mail of the UK reported today.

The 51-year-old Neil Ferguson, who wanted the entire mankind to be under house arrest, reportedly asked his lover Antonia Staats, 38, to travel across London to his home at least twice “despite lecturing 66 million in Britain on the need to stay apart to stop the spread of the killer virus that has killed 32,375 people.”

Ferguson, director of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College, London, wrote the report which frightened the world and triggered the inhuman and ruinous lockdown all over the world. The report said that that the novel coronavirus would kill five lakh Britons and 2.2 million Americans. This was the prime reason that Prime Minister Boris Johnson imposed the lockdown on March 23.

A week later, however, Staats, “travelled across the capital to visit her scientist lover.” While she was at his residence, Ferguson “apparently warned the country the lockdown would be necessary until June in a BBC interview…”

How cool! Stolen kisses, they say, are always sweet. Forbidden love must be much sweeter—forbidden in more senses than one. It reminded me of a song from <em>Gateway Of India</em> (1957) by Mohammed Rafi and Asha Bhosle: <em>Do ghadi vo jo paas aa baithe, hum zamaane se dur ja baithe… </em>(As she came into my arms, I forgot the entire world, <iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Sm_tmr7cYQk" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>.

Rules are for fools, made by wise men and women—the men and women like Ferguson and Staats.

Ferguson wants to play God; he wants to save the world from the coronavirus; his counsel is to lock up everybody so that they don’t infect anybody else. That is, everybody but himself; being divine, he cannot infect anybody, even if he had tested corona positive. In a statement, he said, “I acted in the belief that I was immune, having tested positive for coronavirus and completely isolated myself for almost two weeks after developing symptoms.”

His beliefs are more important than others’ lives. It didn’t occur to the great epidemiologist that he could have infected his girlfriend, her husband, and her family. “Her first visit to his home on March 30 coincided with a public warning he himself gave that lockdown measures would need to stay in place until June,” The Sun reported. “She made a second trip on April 8, 2020, despite telling friends she suspected her husband—an academic in his thirties—had coronavirus symptoms.”

This is the arrogance, self-righteousness, and hypocrisy of the self-appointed guardians of mankind. Since they are divinely ordained to save the world, the laws of the land don’t apply to them.

They are also favorably inclined towards the draconian measures China adopted in Wuhan where “you try to reduce contact between people and community.” How? By violating human rights and civil liberties of people, which don’t exist in China anyway. “In one case,” the magazine Time reported, “a teenager with cerebral palsy died when his father and brother were forced into quarantine, leaving him alone. A man with cancer in Huanggang, a city near Wuhan also under lockdown, said he was unable to purchase life-saving medicine, according to HRW [Human Rights Watch].”

Ferguson, the wannabe savior of mankind, wants the entire world to be China.

His lover, Staats, is no different, for she is reportedly a Leftwing campaigner. She is a senior campaigner for Avaaz, a global online activist network. It promotes, among other things, action against corruption and poverty. Fighting poverty seems to be lucrative business, for she lives in a £1.9-million house with her family.

The saviors are having fun, whereas humanity is suffering. The question is: who would save the world from the saviors?.