Lessons learned from the Coronavirus Pandemic —or not?!

I promise the post contains no exponential graphs, no predictions, no heavy data and no statistics — just a heartfelt message about how we Homosapiens are not as smart as we think we are

My next vacation - London, Paris or New York?
My next job application - Google, Facebook or Amazon?
Wedding plans?
Where do I see myself in the next 6 months? An year?
All sorted. All done. Or so we thought!

*Evil laugh by a virus which-must-not-be-named*

Visionaries like Bill Gates already predicted back in 2015 that WWIII won’t be fought with nuclear weapons. It would be fought with a different weapon.

Please find the link to the complete TED Talk as below:

https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_the_next_outbreak_we_re_not_ready?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare

But as it turns out, we were least bothered then. But should we now?

Who would have imagined that a tiny, microscopic organism would bring the so-called most superior species on the planet to its knees?
China or no China, this was bound to happen. There is always a perpetrator, but it goes deeper than that.

With the Earth crying for years now, the forests burning incessantly, the rivers drying perennially, do we need any other eye openers for us?!

Don’t the great Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata (yes, the ones we watch so fondly these days), teach us something?! Why have we lost all our values, the prime essence of humanity, compassion, sensibility, sensitivity and all those things which make us a so-called uppish breed! It’s not our nucleur weapons, it’s not our shreds of paper we call money, it’s not the reserves of oil we fight for, aren’t these being rendered useless as of now??

Even after all this, even after our lives being turned upside down, if we don’t focus on the gravity of the situation, if we don’t change our ways of living, our perception of the world, our ingratitude towards nature, our cruelty to animals, the end is not far..!

Fight all you want - over religion, over race, over temples and mosques, over Prophet and Jesus, over Dollars and Yuan - till there is nothing left to fight for, till there is no one left to fight!

We might get out of this, and the next one after this and the next one and maybe even the next after that, coz yes we are smart. But how smart? (After all we are all looking like caged animals in a zoo right now!) We have all seen multiple trailers of a grand movie before the final showdown!
No one becomes extinct by choice! Why should the human race be any different!?

Please see how the recent lockdowns and the reduced global activity is helping the Earth to heal:

https://youtu.be/HVwjs_D_kRI

I hope it’s still not too late. I hope the choices that the world leaders and we as inhabitants of this planet make, allow us to find a balance. To strike a chord with Nature. To find peace and harmony amongst ourselves. And negotiate a trade off which is not too costly for us.