Shadows and Dust
Coronavirus and the human insignificance
A global pandemic was something I only read in novels, watched in films, heard about in music. Never in my feeble existence did I anticipate I’d get to witness one real time.
The death toll keeps rising, fake news keep spreading, cure seems far away. Locked down in isolation, turned away by friends, and interfacing with the world over a keyboard. Seems like the future envisioned by our sci-fi forefathers has come to bear, but only with the veneer of fear rather than progress.
Despite our technological process, isolation techniques, and analysis, nature seems to one-up us one way or another. What surprises are in store in the future, I wonder. The triumph of human endeavour falls flat in the face of the microbial minuscule. All we can do is prevent?
As someone who is a fan of doomsday fiction, it is difficult to reconcile the tragedy of what’s happening in the middle of our comfort bubbles. It lays to waste every social, moral, and ethical construct humankind has ever envisioned. There is panic buying in affected areas, hoarding of supplies where there is an increased risk, and there is an overhanging fear of which city will show up on the morbidity radar.
Countries covering up their tracks, people flouting rules in fear, and pseudoscience being peddled, seems the construct of social cohesion has fallen apart at the first available opportunity. It is almost Machiavellian to assume enmity on people and view everyone as competition but I guess the moment the flag-off bullet is fired, it’s each man for himself.
This is a trying time, a hotbed for idleness, a breeding ground for all sorts of evil machinations, propaganda, and ominous intentions. I can already imagine underground armies with their sinister gadgets, mobilising their content creation to make the best use of this situation.
Little good can be expected from this. It’s perversely satisfying how when the whole world was in political and economic disarray, a real mortal threat has surfaced. Nature is not without a sense of irony.
There is no silver lining in this hour. The only possibility I see is people realise how their dark disquiet disconnections have brought us to this situation, where we can only brave the situation hiding under our own bedcovers, wishing the problem away. It won’t. Not so fast.
In the end, we are alive for one small blip in the grand timeline of the earth. And perhaps our own follies will result in our undoing. The world will not end tonight, life will go on, this too shall pass. But this is a good indicator of how pandemics will be dealt with in the future too.
Our literature of yore highlights many grand tragedies where even the greatest losses are the biggest triumphs of character, of rising above the adversities, of overcoming humongous odds. But it’s only when a real pandemic arrives, do we get to know our own strengths, which is none.
If the world is to end, if civilisation is to ebb away, if the memory of our existence is to be wiped out on this tiny little corner of the universe, it shall not be with a bang, it shall not be with heroics, nor with fervour. Instead, it shall be a whimper, a mere holding of breath, and by the time we exhale, all we will be are shadows and dust.
