The one word that describes the global response to coronavirus pandemic is kerfuffle. As confusion, chaos, and cacophony still reign supreme, the considered response is drowned in the din. It is ironic that the human mind is still clueless about a plausible solution to the problem, our reactions largely replicating that of the experimental pigeon in a Skinner’s box. Psychologist BF Skinner in his famous operant conditioning experiments on learning had placed a hungry pigeon in an apparatus he had designed and hence it is called the Skinner’s box. The box was so designed that there is a button on one side which when pecked by the pigeon would give a food pellet with a tinkering sound. But pigeons are not supposed to peck buttons so the animal has to learn the response. However, it was first important to lead the animal to the button and for this Skinner devised a mechanism called successive approximation. Thus, for every move towards the button, the animal would be rewarded with a food pellet so that it is able to reach to the button in due course. Interestingly, it also made the pigeon acquire a superstitious behaviour, that is, it would link reward with the move it made in the process of reaching the button. So if the button is on the left and the animal takes two steps left and gets a food pellet it would repeat the move thinking that food pellet came as a result of taking those steps to the left. Similar is the global human response to the pandemic. Everyday one new solution is being suggested, and as weird as injecting sanitisers or drinking a few drops of Dettol mixed in water. Despite world level agencies of health, like WHO and others, which spend billions of dollars on health care research, pointing out that the virus can be deactivated by simple soap solution and can be kept at bay by cloth masks. Unfortunate, but the response is a large scale trial and error exercise, a kind of solutioneering rarely seen before. The trillion dollars’ pharma industry is helpless and the all knowing medical fraternity befuddled as governments all over are trying to deal with it with a heavy handed bureaucracy imposing extreme laws. Rather than administrate, there is need to innovate. But amid all this Kerfuffle, the thing that has been proved beyond doubt is that the grandmother’s prescriptions had much more science behind them than what medical science touted. Interestingly, many such prescriptions are working too, while so-called well researched medical solutions are not. In these corona times when there are too many questions and too few answers, we now realise how and why our spices exports in ancient times made the subcontinent the prosperous Golden Bird. While corporate hospitals are charging a fortune from the Corona patients, the medicines provided are largely desi but for those strong antibiotics and antiviral drugs that work less and damage more. It is time we reconsidered our views on these home made potions which form a part of what the west calls alternate medicine. In fact, we must question why this nomenclature “Alternate Medicine” after all when they are working in many cases.

Pathak is a professor of management, writer, and an acclaimed public speaker. He can be reached at ppathak.ism@gmail.com