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