Skip to main content

The World After COVID

Migrant workers returning home in India


The world won’t be much different after the coronavirus has done with its yomp. Quite a lot of people would have vanished from the face of the earth altogether. There may not even be a tomb to mark their final rest. Those who are fortunate to be left behind may wonder what life is all about. Is it anything more than Shakespeare’s tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing? A walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more?

What happened to all those multi-speciality hospitals, surgical expertise, billion-dollar machinery? The wireless brain sensors and the robotic surgeons buckled. Precision medicines and Virtual Reality devices capitulated. Will the global telemedicine market be worth the prophesied $113.1 billion by 2025? Will CRISPR [Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats] be the new God with its advanced gene-editing technology?

Mankind never gives up. It has witnessed too many calamities and pandemics. Nothing has stopped its march with gigantic steps toward establishing firmly its lordship over the planet. COVID-19 is just a boulder the in the course of the river. The river will find its way.

A few thousands will have lost their lives in the meanwhile. Does that matter? Such losses are always personal. Mankind is not concerned with personal losses. Mankind is concerned with progress, with attaining godhood.

Thousands of poor people are walking on the roads of India trying to reach home from their workplaces where they have been languishing without work, without proper food, without anything to do, cut off from relatives and people who matter to them. They are walking hundreds of kilometres. A few of them have to walk thousands of kilometres! This in a country whose Prime Minister has put aside Rs 20 lakh crore [20000000000000] for dealing with the situation.

Even now, when a microscopic virus is teaching people all over the world that money isn’t going to save them, the Indian government’s allocation of money is going into wrong hands. For example, a part of that money is being spent on medical ventilators being bought at Rs 400,000 each when their actual cost could be as little as Rs 10,000.  That is just one example. Be sure that nothing more than a tiny fraction of the allocated funds will reach the people of India, unless you take a handful of minions as the people of India.

The ruling party in India, BJP, is known for corruption of a different sort. It diverts money openly and people support such swindles because religion is being used to uphold the entire misguided political system. The diverted funds are being used to create a Hindu Rashtra. This is what people are made to believe. And people are also made to believe that the Hindu Rashtra is going to be a kind of utopia. Even COVID-19 hasn’t altered those beliefs.

And that is how COVID-19 is going to leave the world. The world will learn almost nothing.

The world passed through similar catastrophes earlier too. And they didn’t make man any better a creature.

Man doesn’t learn. That’s the real tragedy. As philosopher Schopenhauer said long ago, man goes by his blind will which is made of his passions and instincts. His intellect is too feeble. Most people don’t even use the brain. Every animal is driven by the will, the will to live. Man is driven by nothing else fundamentally. Logic has never convinced that will of anything. Religion has. Rhetoric has. Romantic dream has.

That is how the world will continue to be even after COVID-19. The gods will return to the temples that have been closed. Their priests and other patrons will return. Blindness will continue to be the ultimate virtue.

Those with open eyes will be pushed out of visibility.  They can sit and rewrite the story of अंधेर नगरी चौपट्ट राजा





Comments

  1. Tragedy in motion. No end in sight.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. In the beginning, when this commotion started, I thought the government would do something about it. But the exodus is still going on and people are dying on roads with governments doing nothing! That's just a fraction of the problem anyway.

      Delete
  2. It is a case of too little too late!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Nobody knows what tomorrow awaits and there is enough on our plates already. With Government playing its dirty deeds, I wonder what more of shocking news i can bear

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Harsh times reveal our true character. We are witnessing the true character of our leaders. My gut feeling is that their time is running out.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Chhattisgarh Story

Deforestation in Chhattisgarh Kerala’s Catholic Church is teeming with rage these days because of the arrest of two nuns in Chhattisgarh on false charges. No one seems to understand the real politics behind the Modi government’s enmity towards Christian missionaries in Chhattisgarh as well as other backward states in its neighbourhood. Modi is selling the tribal areas and forestlands to the corporate sector part by part, his friend Adani being the chief benefactor. The Christian missionaries are a severe hindrance in that commerce. Let us get some facts right, at least. The Adivasi villagers allege that Gram Sabhas (local governing bodies) were forged or manipulated under pressure from Adani and the BJP government officials in order to take away their lands. In Hasdeo Aranya, minutes of the local body meetings were altered to show the villagers’ consent for land transfers. Also, the Chhattisgarh Scheduled Tribes Commission found that Panchayat secretaries were detained and coerc...