The recent declaration by the World Health Organisation says that the pandemic is no longer a public health emergency.In other words it is over. But there are certain crucial lessons that it leaves for us to remember. Whether humanity will learn those lessons is the big question. Particularly, because our past record is not very encouraging on this count. It was some three years back that the corona virus descended on humanity. Call it a natural catastrophe or God’s ire, the impact was devastating as the entire humanity came to a standstill. Probably, God wanted humanity to get a taste of what divine disruption is all about. We had been interfering with the ways of nature and creating all sorts of disruptions to feed our ego. Without any sense of remorse we kept on advocating exploitative disruption as the new way of life, caring two hoots for those warnings that nature intermittently had been giving. Pride had to come to a fall.Nursing assumptions that our escapades would not irk God, we failed to realise that even the divine patience can give way,as in the past. So Corona, like its previous avatars, was pressed into service. For one more time God was angry. And rightly so, because we had not learnt from the past, and the punishments that befell were conveniently forgotten. From the great Deluge of the Old Testament to the wrath of modern times, humanity has hardly changed. Even the deadly scourge of 100 years ago had no trace in our collective unconscious as we continued with our rampage on nature. Our actions continued to disrupt the equilibrium of the wonderful system created by the Lord, leaving for him just one option.Corona, thus, was a divinely ordained course correction.Rather, the coarse correction. Humanity had failed to mend its ways and is still not learning.
Where have we gone wrong? Our attitude and ego are the culprits. Instead of acknowledging God’ s munificence and showing gratitude for all that has come by His grace, we take those as our entitlement. The mission of the corona virus pandemic was to make humanity realise that being the highest order in the creation of the Almighty, it needs to behave virtuously like human beings. Instead, it tampered with nature’s bounty, throwing spanners in God’s design for sensual gratification. The intervention,for the umpteenth time, was for the same reason -to make us learn the art of living with nature. To utilise rather than exploit resources. To live and let live. The experience of the past suggests that much learning is still to come despite several periodic attempts from the Lord Almighty. True, human beings have come out of the stone age, but the stone age has not come out of them. Even as we watch our tribe perish, our greed keeps us blind and our ego continues to drive us to unreason. We need to ponder whether pandemics are all biology, or there is a good bit of psychology involved.
shashwatchintan 