ON VIRUS

One can’t. Nobody can, nobody has. What? Ignore truth. And the truth is that COVID-19 remains unstoppable and has to be jointly fought. Its satanic vigour is no pushover and needs the whole universe to fight it.  

Therefore, we should keep our petty political differences aside and fight the killer. I am saying so because there are political groups, which are still carrying out violent attacks.   

The unseen tyrant has taken away over a million lives in over a hundred days from right in front of leaders who are never tired of telling us about space holidays, technological and scientific advancements. Yet after months they don’t know who the enemy is.  

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All human effort to abridge the agony has been greeted with mass graves

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Human angst has never had a  filthier and a more expanding face than it has had in the last three months or so. All human effort to abridge the agony has been greeted with mass graves even in civilisational power points like New York.

NY or elsewhere the story doesn’t change. I will start coughing today, tomorrow life will cough me out. And bystanders will be left watching helplessly the end-journey as slaves used to when their ilk were thrown to starving lions by ancient royals for sport.

Let’s come back to the settling of political scores. I was horrified to read about rockets being fired in some parts of the world as most countries were busy counting their body bags. I also saw a report about a political group finding new ways of protest. I want to put one simple question to them: is protest above existence?   

The crisis has reached a point where the maker of Lamborghini car has been pushed to produce face masks.

So ruthless is our enemy that it isn’t even allowing people to bury their loved ones in a dignified way. In some cases, bodies are being bagged and buried as if they were carcasses that just had to be disposed of.

In other cases, they are being cremated with perfunctory rituals.

A friend, who lost a cousin to the coronavirus, said after repeated requests the authorities allowed merely four people at the burial.

I wasn’t really very impressed when years ago Mother Teresa told this reporter, “we can’t cure everybody we bring to our home, but at least they have a beautiful and peaceful death here.” Beauty and death and peace as one left the world, I thought they were purely philosophical observations that were meant to be consolatory in nature. I was horribly wrong.

I understood what she meant when I recently saw two images.

First, coffins being placed hurriedly in a series in a mass grave in New York. One could clearly feel the total absence of a ceremony worth its name.

Second, relatives of a victim placing a body bag in the back of a van as if they were transporting a piece of used furniture. Reverence for the dead was missing in both the cases.    

Well, when and how is it going to end? There seems to be no clear answer. Lockdown is a measure, we need a cure.