The second wave of COVID-19 in April 2021 created a month-long horror show of people dying due to a shortage of medical oxygen and hospital beds, dead bodies floating in the river Ganga, and rampant black-marketing of lifesaving drugs. Come June 2021, the season had yet to change, and a sea of tourists flocked to Himachal Pradesh. Escaping soaring summer temperatures, scores of affluent people, in their fancy cars, made a run for Manali, Shimla, Kufri and Dalhousie. Within a month’s time, about a million ‘tourists’ made a mockery of corona-appropriate behavior, as if in vengeance.

When I hear experts sweating out every evening on TV, discussing variants and further waves of coronavirus, none of them speak the naked truth, that is, that the virus, by itself, has no ability to mutate and create a wave. An infected person must intermingle with other people to transmit it. If this transmission from one person to another stops, the game of the virus will be over – there will be no mutation and no further wave. So, who is responsible for the waves? Crowding! That was what happened during the recent religious congregation, election rallies and cricket matches. Moreover, if one goes to any vegetable market in any town, one will find a total absence of pandemic-appropriate behavior. There has been a disdain for science among Indian people in general, and it is not fading, but rather ‘mutating’ into haughtiness, to use virus terminology. 

It is a pity that instead of addressing this issue, we either discuss topics such as whether the virus was a bioweapon, which of the two Indian vaccines is better, whether the third wave will affect children more severely, or make statements such as, “I will wait for an ‘imported’ vaccine to arrive.” We see radiating curiosity take in details of everything in the room, except the elephant standing quietly there. Sagacious wisdom watching the meaningless chatter is like a lighthouse in the turbulent sea. Dr Amartya Sen, in his book ‘The Argumentative Indian’, mentions the ability of Indian people to discuss any topic at length, “Prolixity is not alien to us in India. We are able to talk at some length.”

“The elephant in the room” is a metaphorical idiom. So, instead of chatting about never-ending details of our likes and dislikes, political storms in teacups, and games we have never ourselves played, let us look at the elephant. What is one big truth of our times? One can see how the modern world has been hijacked by few large corporations. They have been extracting natural resources – oil, iron ore, and so on – as spoils of the two World Wars in the last century. Now, in the 21^st century, they own whatever is manufactured and grown on earth. Every small business that your eye can see is owned by corporations – directly or through banks – as part of their global supply chains. When a popular brand portrays its logo as an arrow from ‘a’ to ‘z’, it blatantly declares that they indeed own everything that is bought and sold in this world. It is a fact as conspicuous as the elephant that can appear to be overlooked.

Or, the fact that more than twenty-one hundred billionaires globally own more of the world’s wealth than the five billion people at the bottom of the wealth pyramid; that the richest one percent have accumulated twice as much wealth as 90 percent of the global population. The elephant knows that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been working on the coronavirus, receiving funding from the United States. As has been the case of all other major issues in the history of mankind, the powers that control the world at a certain point of time decide ‘the official narrative’ of what is accepted as the ‘truth’ and recorded as a ‘fact’ for posterity.

Or, the fact that governments can only collect taxes and spend them without any real control on the business of the world. COVID-19 would not have become a pandemic had it not spread by the heavy air traffic of millions of people shuttling between continents daily, most of them affluent Chinese tourists celebrating their new year. Online retail has led to global supply chains and industrial production of food. Are not people in India eating fruits from New Zealand and almonds from California? Are not antibiotics and growth hormones injected into animals in poultry and dairy farms?

Finally, urbanization has been forced upon people across the world as their only way out of rural poverty. Who were those people, helpless and scared out of their lives, walking on the roads during the lockdown last year? Why have they all returned quietly even after suffering such an ordeal? Thomas Friedman, in his book on global warming and clean energy, published in 2007, called the modern world ‘hot, flat and crowded.’ It has been made so by large corporations so that they own everything possible on the planet and make a profit out of every activity of mankind.

The root cause of COVID-19, which earlier was SARS-CoV, even earlier was H1N1, and will be something else in future, is the overpopulated and unequal world. The fact is that when billions of people faced the hardships of lockdowns, including loss of their livelihoods, a handful of billionaires made merry. In April 2021, when President Joe Biden informed the U.S. Congress that at a time when twenty million Americans lost their jobs in the pandemic, roughly 650 billionaires in America saw their net worth increase by more than $1 trillion and that they were now worth more than $4 trillion, he was at least acknowledging the elephant in the room.

Know that wherever there are marginalized people, whose lives are entwined with the wild, where animals are slaughtered for their meat, local butcher shops and fish markets, the zoonotic viruses are getting transmitted into human bodies. These slow-motion snippets must be captured and pruned to avoid them later becoming an apocalyptic feature-length film. As Lord Buddha said, “That is because that is, if this stops that stops.” What happened in Wuhan can happen anywhere, anytime, if business as usual goes on. And it is going on. American novelist Ellen Wittlinger (b. 1948) put it plainly when she said, “When there is an elephant in the room, you can’t pretend it isn’t there and just discuss the ants.”

On the eve of my cardiac bypass surgery on 6 February, 2004, at the Care Hospital, Hyderabad, my friend, Madhu Reddy, the Chief of University Press, who published Wings of Fire came to see me. He gifted me, Glass Palace, a book written by, perhaps the best of contemporary authors, Amitav Ghosh (b. 1956). I read the entire 552-page novel while still in hospital, recovering from the surgery. When President Dr APJ Abdul Kalam came to see me, he saw the book and asked me to brief him on it. 

Later, when I visited him at Rashtrapati Bhavan in May 2004, I stayed there for about a week and had the opportunity of telling him the story of King Thibaw Min (1859-1916), the last king of Burma, and the central character in the novel, during our daily walks in the Mughal Gardens. With the story of how Burma lost its freedom to the British as its backdrop, the novel brought out the involvement of Indian-origin people in Burmese society, the complicated business of timber and rubber plantations, the moral dilemmas faced by soldiers in the British Indian Army, when Japan conquered Burma, who eventually formed the Azad Hind Fauj and finally, their exit as victims of rioting when Burma regained independence in January 1948. 

While the entire coastal Burma was under British rule, the kingdom of Ava in Upper Burma was still sovereign, with Thibaw as king, living in the sprawling and magnificent Glass Palace in Mandalay. When it fell to the British in 1885, the king was captured with his family and taken away to India. He briefly stayed in Madras and was later shifted to the rather remote town of Ratnagiri on the Konkan coast practically under house arrest. A 30-room house was built for him, that exists even today. The king died in 1916 and after that, his family was sent back to Burma.  

President Kalam arranged my meeting with General U Kyi Thein, Ambassador of Myanmar (as Burma is now called) in New Delhi. He facilitated my visit to Myanmar along with cardiologist, Dr P Krishnam Raju. This visit helped revitalize “old but cold” India-Myanmar relations. Soon after, Myanmar President Senior General Than Shwe visited India in October 2004 and President Kalam visited Myanmar in March 2006. I was involved in both visits. In Yangon, we visited the mausoleum of Bahadur Shah’s Zafar, who was exiled here in 1857 after the sack of Delhi by the British. When Dr Kalam was signing the visitor’s book, we noticed the signature of General Muhammad Zia-Ul-Haq (1924-1988), President of Pakistan, who had been there in May 1985. 

Mandalay, located on the east bank of the mighty Irrawaddy River, 716 km north of Yangon, was pristine. Atop the 800 feet high Mandalay Hill, is the Sutaungpyei (literally wish-fulfilling) Pagoda. When we were standing there, our host pointed to a jail complex on the western side, where Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856-1920) was imprisoned from 1908 to 1914 on sedition charges by the British. Lokmanya famously dared the judge who convicted him saying, “There are higher powers that rule the destinies of men and nations; and I think, it may be the will of Providence that the cause I represent may be benefited more by my suffering than by my pen and tongue.” It was during this period that Lokmanya wrote the book, Gita Rahasya.

Many years later, when I visited Tilakji’s house in Pune, I saw a tableau of Lokmanya writing Gita Rahasya in the jail. It inspired me to write A Modern Interpretation of Lokmanya Tilak’s Gita Rahasya. The book was published in December 2017, and I consider it my best work. The book was released by the Chief Ministers of Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra at a glittering centenary ceremony to mark the occasion of Lokmanya Tilak’s call of “Swaraj is my birthright, and I shall have it” at Lucknow in 1916. At the event, I met Lokmanya’s great-grandson, Shailesh Tilak. He hugged me affectionately. A line from Glass Palace surfaced in my memory, “Every life leaves behind an echo that is audible to those who take the trouble to listen.” I felt as if a strange loop got closed with that hug. 

I recently read another excellent book, The King in Exile, by Sudha Shah, published in 2012, narrating the saga of King Thibaw and focusing on the struggle of his family in exile, especially the Queen and the four princesses. It is a deeply moving book, with meticulously collected old photographs, offering a powerful testimony of how fate tosses human lives. Times have changed but not the reality of this world. 

The effect of COVID-19 on migrant workers is a great human tragedy that people are not even willing to talk about. Old and dilapidated buildings are regularly falling in the rains in Mumbai and elsewhere, rendering people homeless overnight. In North India, floods in the Himalayan rivers every year wash away whatever little people living in their basins have, forcing them to live in perennial poverty. 

In what has become a ritual, a cruel pattern indeed, is the announcement of a “relief package” after every flood. In what assumes a comic dimension, the State government demands a very large sum, say in billions, and the Central government provides a moderate sum, say in millions, and no one really knows what the people who lost their everything to the calamity get and to what effect. There is no long-term solution to manage floods, even contemplated. We remain predominantly a rain-fed agricultural nation taking “chances” with the monsoon every year to bring enough water so that we can grow our food. 

Is the era of empires over? Not at all. Let us look at the present world closely. I recently read a 2019 book, The Big Nine, by Amy Webb (b. 1974) about how nine corporations — Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, Microsoft, IBM, and Apple — are the new gods of AI and are controlling billions of people. These “systems” operating the world don’t share the motivations, desires, or hopes of humanity but operate for their own efficiency and wealth. What do we do with our Swaraj? People, even the affluent, are fast losing control of their lives and businesses. Children who are settled abroad for their livelihoods are indeed living in glorified exile. Many elderly people die alone, helpless, and powerless, like King Thibaw.

When the biblical king, Solomon, declared, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9), it was not a world-weary complaint against life’s monotony, but a truth, stated plain and simple. The nature of human life and the world that humanity makes for itself is indeed cyclic. Did we not see the emptiness of living only for being alive during the year-old and still-on-roll COVID-19 pandemic? Living under a hypnotic spell is alright as long as we don’t forget what it is to be human.

One of my fond childhood memories is that of visiting the hydel station cum water pump at Bhola, near Meerut City with my father. We took a public bus, which was divided into two zones – the front and the rear – and there was a differential in ticket. The road was a mix of strips of masonry and asphalt. The sight of gushing water was amazing! There were massive fruit-laden trees. We returned in the evening. 

After my father passed away in 1979, that connection was severed. But my younger brother developed a spiritual bonding with Swami Vivekanand Sarasvatiji, who had an ashram in the vicinity of the hydel station, and I visited him many times. Awareness dawned upon me that the water stream was in fact the Upper Ganges Canal built during 1842 to 1854 by the East India Company, connecting Haridwar to Aligarh for irrigation and as a waterway.

Once, in 1969, while returning from Haridwar, we passed through the Solani Aqueduct in Roorkee. The driver stooped the bus briefly so that everyone could see how the Upper Ganges Canal was flowing over a 300-meter-long bridge crossing over the Solani River. One passenger announced that the song, “Nanha Munna Rahi Hun, Desh Ka Sipahi Hun” — from the 1962 film, “Son of India” was picturized at this location. Of course, I was more interested in looking at the pairs of large stone lions, placed at each end of the aqueduct.

In 1998, when Dr APJ Abdul Kalam went to the convocation of Roorkee Engineering College, now the Indian Institute of Technology, I assisted him in writing his speech. The speech recalled how this engineering college was started in 1847 to teach engineering to “the natives” to meet the need of constructing the Upper Ganges Canal and was later named The Thomason College of Civil Engineering. Dr Kalam thundered, “Those ‘natives’ have put a satellite into orbit and have now a Nuclear Weapon!” 

A nation moves ahead through big projects. The Manhattan Project that produced the first nuclear weapons decided the ending of World War II. Dr J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904 -1967) inspired Dr Homi J. Bhabha and Prof Vikram Sarabhai, whose leadership would later create BARC and ISRO. U.S. President, John F. Kennedy, on May 25, 1961, announced the goal of landing a man on the Moon by the end of the decade and it eventually happened. The construction of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River was a major project that put China on the road to become a World Power. 

So, where are our big projects? After the Light Combat Aircraft that made its maiden flight in 2001 could not be productionized till 2016 for political reasons, India is yet to see something big happening. Where are the new Nuclear Power Stations? The plan of Thorium-based reactors? Our passenger aircraft? Our Bullet Train? Why have we become a society continuously arguing on every little thing and unable to see the big picture and afraid to take strides? A big nation ought to think big, do big, and deliver big. 

What are the big dreams India can have? Becoming a 5-trillion economy is a neat, right, and doable dream. It is unfortunate that rather than a discussion on “how,” there is a chorus of naysayers, ridiculing the idea itself as if this nation must forever remain a nation of daily-wage farm labourers. Why not have ten of India’s higher education institutes in world ranking? A medical college with a 1000-bed hospital in every district? A house for every family? Tap water in every home? No open drainage in any city of more than a million people? If these things happen, the rest will happen automatically.

India must get rid of its perennial flood problem. This one “project” will transform our villages. Floods in India are turning more severe, unpredictable, and rather intractable every year. It is a no-brainer that hundreds of water courses originate from the Himalayas flooding Kosi, Gandak, Damodar, Brahmaputra and Mahanadi in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Assam and wash away properties and livelihoods of millions of people who as a result, live in perennial poverty. The Western Ghats have become the new flood zones and cloudburst-like situations are playing havoc every year. 

Why is the country of legendary engineer, Dr M. Visvesvaraya, shying away from discussing a River-linking project? We need to wake up to the fact that India accounts for 18% of the world population, which will become 20% and eventually 25% by 2050, and has about 4% of the world’s water resources, which will turn less than 2% in the same period. Which other solutions would solve the country’s water woes but to link our rivers? People getting killed by water in some areas and dying from dehydration in some other parts can’t be our destiny.  

Beyond water security, the canals as waterways would ease the stress on transport infrastructure, hydro power would feed grid, and fish farming would broaden income sources in rural areas. The cost of power generation by solar power is steadily declining and soon, say by 2025, renewable power would be available for water lifting/pumping, giving an advantage that was never there. But such an enterprise must be immune from electoral politics and declared by the Parliament as a National Mission.

The cost of not doing this is going to be existential. No national economy operates in isolation. People with vehicles at the petrol pumps swallow this bitter truth every day. The bumper crops in irrigated areas and dismal situation of rain-fed farming is a fact well laid out. I personally saw the chorus of “disaster” when the Sardar Sarovar Dam was created to better utilize the water of the Narmada in Gujarat. But now that it has happened, the transformation that has come is apparent and undeniable. We can’t condemn people living in river-basins to suffer every year and flourish as a nation. 

The Katha Upanishad declares, उत्तिष्ठत जाग्रत प्राप्य वरान्निबोधत – Arise, awake, find those who know and learn from them (1.3.14). The nation has seen enough of electoral bickering and petty politics during the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, there is nothing for which any one can claim any credit. The system has exposed its inadequacies and the society, its organic defects. Why can we not come out of the hypnotic spell of words like “world leader”, “superpower” and the “largest democracy” and show something real for the good of the people, especially the poor and the powerless, who are fast losing hope.   

There has been a well-orchestrated campaign in the media to amplify the devastating effect of the pandemic in India. While the excitement of some foreign channels to show emerging India in a bad light can be understood, why Indian channels chose to add to the mood of despair was baffling. If it was to put down the government in power, it was a pity. The nation is bigger than governments, and political parties have lost all credibility when it comes to serving people or working for the national cause. They are all in the business of powers with different optics.

Who makes the state? The civil service, the police service, medical doctors, nurses, and so on. These are made of people who are inducted through well-established selection procedures, are trained extensively, and who work as a well-knit bureaucratic system. All media houses are owned by business houses, indulge in rampant advertising for making money and use it to manipulate the power structure in the society. It is a vicious circle that the modern world is sinking into.

So, this brings up the question – are we living in a pre-set system, watching a game whose result is already “fixed,” like mere audience in a cinema theater watching a film, or, are we part of a civil society, stakeholders in the governance of the country and participants in its social development? The plight of the migrant workers in 2020, and the helpless people on the roads outside hospitals gasping for oxygen in 2021 have proved that the system as it exists has been highjacked by the powerful, and the ordinary people are fated to only struggle and endure. They are not even the viewers; they make the view, watched by the more fortunate others who feel good that it is not happening to them.

I read in the 1980s, Games People Play, a book written by Canadian American psychiatrist, Eric Berne (1910-1970), who created the theory of Transactional Analysis as a way of explaining human behavior. Everyday examples of the ways in which human beings are caught up in larger games was very insightful. People are born and die in poverty in spite of their best efforts.

As the world runs today, a young person joins an organization to become a life-time slave. All businesses are eventually owned by a few. And the elite have rigged democracy. You can never win an election if you are not supported by those holding the levers of power. The Electoral Bond scheme, by virtue of the anonymity it offers to donors, has already streamlined the financing of political parties by the big businesses.

Recently, I read, The Master Game, written by English biochemist, Robert S. de Ropp (1913-1987), a prominent author in the fields of human potentials and the search for spiritual enlightenment after his brilliant scientific career. He lamented that contemporary man, hypnotized by the glitter of his own gadgets, has little contact with his inner world.

In the 1980s, when de Ropp said so, there was no 24×7 TV, Internet, and mobile phones. In 2021, our minds are bustling at the seams under cognitive surplus and our inner worlds have indeed gone numb. An increasing number of people have slipped into a trance of indifference, and we are fast losing the collective consciousness that keeps a society functional and healthy.

Interestingly, de Ropp called the games played for wealth, fame, glory, and victory, as “low games.” He compared modern day “strivers” to pigs – getting their noses in the trough as deeply as possible, guzzling as much as possible, and elbowing the other aside as forcefully as possible. They are hungry to be known and talked about, like the proverbial cock on his dunghill, primarily to inflate the false ego and to keep it inflated. And there are leaders who would use these masses as bricks and mortar to make their citadels.

The family system is a meta-game so that people raise good children to work in the wealth-generating machines later. Religion is another meta-game. It peddles “salvation” to its followers and besides “attracting strategic investments,” an enormous amount of money is extracted from the followers for “operational expenses.” The great meta-game of science and technology is played for “knowledge”, defined to perpetuate power and profit of the corporations. What options do you have except for buying a 5G telephone, as and when it is available for sale? 

The Upanishads described the four states of human consciousness – waking, dreaming, dream-less sleep and a formless background for these three, called “Turiya.” American philosopher, William James (1842-1910) divided Turiya into Self-transcendence (self-remembering) and Objective Consciousness (cosmic consciousness). An increasing number of young people are getting attracted to alcohol and psychedelics in their desperate attempt to jump to the fourth level of Turiya, by taking a short cut. They are manipulating their minds by chemicals rather than going by the evolutionary path of struggle, pain and making the right and not popular choices.

Actually, before I find fault with younger people taking the short cut of substance abuse, I can see the grand failure of our vast religious enterprise to popularize the right techniques of introspection. Religion has become a branded business run by cults rather than being taught as a way to explore the real meaning of life. There must be some simple and practical system to help an individual to emerge out of a confused, hypnotized automaton state into dynamic, clear-minded self-realization, rather than making a puppet out of him. I found two promising methods which can be adapted to this effect.

Russian mystic and philosopher, George Gurdjieff (1866-1877 – 1949) felt that the traditional methods of self-knowledge—those of the fakir, (acquired through pain), monk (through devotion), and yogi (through study)—were inadequate on their own and often led to various forms of stagnation and one-sidedness. He gave a “fourth method” of inner development in oneself to shift from a semi-hypnotic “waking sleep,” to higher levels of consciousness by feeling and thereby remembering memories of our eternal journey buried in our consciousness.

American mystic, Richard Rose (1917-2005), used the humble term “retreating from error” for high-sounding “spirituality.” In his approach called “Psychology of the Observer: The Path to Reality Through the Self,” Rose proposed a method of becoming an observer of your inner world and feeling all the conflicts going on by sitting alone, cut off from the outer world, every day for some time. This simple practice, over time, will convert your fears and emotions into life-energy, your doubts into substance and facts, and you can live the life of a happy and healthy person.

The COVID-19 pandemic presented a contrast in the way it rolled out in 2020 and in its second wave in 2021 in India. The rigorous lockdown in 2020 prevented large-scale spread of infection and hospitalizations, and mortality levels in India did not exceeded the global trends. However, migrant workers suffered untold miseries and peeled off the veneer off a heartless, self-centered, and transactional society.   

Then, for many months, the pandemic appeared to have receded, and people were back to their carefree ways that included large gatherings and congregations, be it rituals, festivals or election rallies. Even cricket matches were watched by people in packed stadiums. The arrival of an indigenous vaccine along with other global brands created the hubris of India as a “Vishwa-guru” that was leading the world in effectively handling the pandemic. 

 And then, the second wave struck. Even the best hospitals raised their hands in their failure to provide oxygen to needy patients. Questionable therapies like administering convalescent plasma were used to earn enormous profits by the hospitals. Beds were given to highest bidders. Unproven medicines for COVID-19 were sold in the black market. It was as if vultures were hovering everywhere. People were out in the streets not having a hospital bed. To have people not have oxygen was really tragic. 

 What might explain these staggering letdowns in a country that was discussing QUAD with the US, Japan and Australia to counter China only on March 12, 2021? Suddenly, we were receiving oxygen tankers from other countries in aid to fill the demand deficit and a section of the Western media was showing shocking pictures of long lines of dead bodies waiting for cremation. The entire system seemed to have collapsed like a pack of cards. 

In engineering parlance, there are two ways of looking at systemic failure. One focuses on how one part of the assembly failed and took down the whole system. It is a more familiar narrative: find the missing piece, the worn-out cog, the exhausted element that brought the machine to a halt, fix it and voila! Supply shortage of Oxygen in hospitals was highlighted at the center stage of the COVID-19 second wave and fixing it was seen as mission accomplishment.

However, there is a second way of looking at systemic failure. It requires widening the scope to think about the system as a whole and how it crumbled. What turned the well-tamed COVID-19 pandemic into a quick-moving and relentless public health emergency? The answer is – mass religious gatherings, cricket matches, and a general attitude of “all is well” on the one hand. On the other, huge federal budget allocations to augment hospital facilities were found unutilized by many states. Both were the hallmarks of hubris – the arrogance of doing no wrong and doing nothing. A widespread view amongst people, that they are outliers, prevailed with many living in the false belief that “I am in some way distinct from the others, and nothing will happen to me.” 

Media channels had their own hubris. One reality was shown in so many different ways based on who was reporting. Negativity and cynicism were galore. TV reporters were seen cherry-picking scenes, rather than communicating the ground situation. Thousands of lives were saved by valiant doctors, staff and volunteers bringing oxygen from factories on their two-wheelers to help people in need. The way tons of liquid oxygen is now produced by our non-medical industry after modifying their plants in few days’ time is also historic.

 In Greek mythology, hubris is punished by the goddess Nemesis. Overconfidence in our specialness led to lack of preparedness, prevented collaboration with others, and limited the opportunities of learning from the experience of other countries. Deficiencies in administration and greed of the people emerged as punishment by Nemesis for the hubris of “world-power India.” Two lessons are apparent:

1. Panic mongering for profiteering – Most Covid positive patients may recover on their own. The things needed for them to do so are oxygen level monitoring to maintain a level of 93 and above, Paracetamol for fever and body ache, and home isolation to make sure that they do not pass on the virus to others. Large numbers of hospitals beds were occupied by the “affluent anxious,” denying them to those who actually needed them. People were seen squatting on beds for their “Masters,” should they need it. 
2. Highjacking of science – In any infectious disease, the virus mutates while jumping from one host to another. The science is that every mutation adds to transmissibility and virility is lowered. Mutations happen in clusters along the genome. In the SARS-CoV-2 virus of the 30,000-letter long genome, hundreds of mutations have happened and will continue to happen. A hype was created about “double mutations” and the “Indian mutation.” When intellectual garbage was overflowing like an open drain in social media, most of our scientists stayed away from making public rebuttal. 

Except the availability of a vaccine, and cognitive surplus on rampant media, there is no difference between the 1918 Flu pandemic and COVID-19. COVID-19 will run its full course over about 3 to 4 years and stop after herd immunity is achieved, making the virus incapable of causing any mortality. Till such time we need to be humble – moderation in living, and the self-discipline of wearing masks and maintaining social distancing. A very large number of people are just not doing this. 

Nature is as brutal as it is benevolent. Post globalization, in the late 1990s, a pandemic was imminent. It happened in 2002 as the SARS-CoV, in 2009 as H1N1, and then in 2012 as MERS. Luckily, it remained confined to a few countries. Finally, SARS-CoV-2 became a pandemic as a large number of infected tourists carried it across the globe while holidaying for the Chinese New Year in 2020. There were signs of trouble, but they were ignored to prevent losses by the airline and hotel industries. And we had the COVID-19 pandemic! 

A recurring theme in mythology is that of a man or woman who loses sight of human limitations and acts arrogantly and with violence, as if an immortal, and pays a terrible price for it. So, what is the lesson? 

Don’t get carried away and suffer despair. Be humble, live with humility, and like a reed, bend before the storm, waiting for it to pass by, which eventually it will, as it has to. Know your limitation of being a mortal and plan your life a little more meaningfully.