L’Entente Cordiale

At the end of May, an Auronet post announced that the French Consulate in Pondicherry would be providing free Moderna vaccines for any Europeans, due to the Consulate’s probable overstocking for the French residents. I’d been humming and ahhing about the vaccine, starting the process to get a PAN card (an Indian ID card for tax registration, I belatedly discovered) in order to ensure a certificate upon vaccination for potential travel. Many Aurovilians have already been vaccinated with the India-manufactured Covishield (of AstraZeneca origin) or Covaxin vaccines, in numerous sites locally. But when I read this news I jumped, even though I had only once been vaccinated in all my previous forty years. Although I am a British citizen, my mother is German and I had applied for German citizenship some months back, the Consulate accepted me. There even was an American in our group.

Suddenly the 34 or so Aurovilians who registered for the Moderna vaccine were given two days to be in Chennai rather than Pondy, as a lot of the French citizens had left Chennai for France during the pandemic. At this juncture, some people opted out due to the long drive there and back. A sufficiently large cohort of us decided to go, so we looked at booking a bus, but this was not allowed in the strict lockdown. Then we split into separate taxi parties. 

On a day that The Hindu newspaper described as ‘searingly hot’ we drove up along an eerily empty East Coast Road and I discovered that when the bumper-to-bumper traffic jams of my airport runs are removed, Chennai reveals itself to be quite a pretty city. We were stopped four or five times at police checkpoints, but our e-pass and consular permits allowed us to be waved through. 

At the pukka Apollo Hospital we were met by numerous efficient hospital staff and a consular official. There was a noticeable ‘esprit de corps’ with the Aurovilians on foreign turf and I got to meet new people. There is a kind of identifiable sartorial commonality in how we looked. 

After registration we had a preliminary chat with a doctor and a 30 minute wait after the jab and the prized certificate. Then back through the bare roads and highways, past a totally smashed car, which we guessed was disoriented by the lack of traffic, and we were home. The return journey plus the hour in the hospital took six and a half hours – a record for me. In a month we will return for our second injection, probably with traffic, but hopefully just as smoothly and well organized. 

Afterwards, a lot of those vaccinated thanked the Consulate for their efficient organization. It was a generous exhibition of ‘egalité, fraternité,’ and if your medical philosophy extends this far, ‘liberté’.