I Masked By Unmasking You
Hello mankind, I don’t need any introduction. I know you are completely dilapidated and shattered down
because of my diversified forms and mutant character. At least, for many generations, you won’t forget me.
I made you autodidact. I am no more any far-flung guest but have become an inalienable part of your
families as well as your society. Rather I am the talk of the town from last one and a half year now. I
engulfed whole globe. But let me tell you that I didn't differentiate between haves and have-nots, high and
low, developed and under-developed etc. You dealt with me by social distancing but for me all were alike.
I made a foray in your celebrations, plans, decisions and gatherings alike and crumbled all your systems to
encroach into every mind and body despite your scientific or non scientific temperament and technological
know-how that you have accumulated from centuries of basic and applied research against the foreign
elements like me. Alas! You couldn’t resist my arrival, encroachment and rapid aggression. How could
have you? Overall, you are busy in your worldly affairs.
Don’t get confused about me. I am not a super creature or any wise man –called Homo sapiens- like you,
but simply a minute and microscopic creature that too either dead or alive. I don’t have any credibility to
stand against you. Still I attempted and succeeded in my mission against you. Let me be very clear, I didn’t
appear arbitrarily or out of hearsay. I have a purpose to expose the fragility and vulnerability of your species
in particular.
I am merely a warner. You might have witnessed my subordinates before this also but in different forms
like AIDS, Ebola and Swine flu, via monkeys, bats and pigs, to warn you so that you can better understand
the basic purpose of your life and live amicably and peacefully with your fellow beings and other species
as well without creating any mess. But you took those warnings for granted and went on defacing and
destroying this beautiful planet- the only place in entire solar system where life could dwell. When all the
subordinates from my species failed to bring you back on the right path, I had to make entry myself into
your busy world. None would have even thought of my arrival. Doesn't matter how bad name you give me,
I was bestowed the title ‘Corona’. I wish I could produce the luminescence of real Corona.
After residing within you for over a year and half now, I have primarily witnessed plethora of your miseries,
unbearable pain, economic recession, frustration, deep depression, uncountable sufferings and the dead
carcasses of your own people. I swear that I don’t enjoy your losses at all. You might be thinking that I
don’t want to go. No, you are entirely wrong if you even try to think so. I do want to go out of your lives.
In fact, I decided a few months back to disappear all of a sudden but every time I want to go, I remember
that you left no stone unturned in destabilizing the sustenance and normal balance of living systems as well
as snatched the earth out of its beauty and grandeur, throttled other species and used it’s potential resources
in an indiscriminate way. So, I decide to maintain status quo.
Meanwhile, I taught you physical distancing, social distancing, sanitization, hand wash etc. which comprise
the basic ethos of hygiene. Not only this, despite the deep territorialization, boundaries and frontiers, I
deepened the process of globalization by making the countries interdependent for vaccine. Am I so
dangerous and lethal that even vaccines fail to show the full efficacy and some even lost the battle after
getting inoculated also? Did I made you to ponder that life is no doubt a hustling of probabilities? Did I
made you to ponder over your limitations?
Leave it. Let's look at my positive behavior also. After all World Health Organization declared me
pandemic. Ideologically, I made the triumph of categorical imperative of Immanuel Kant's idea of human
dignity. I led the countries to shed their ego and give up the race of competition, trade and benefits and keep
mankind on high pedestal. Wasn't I a blessing in disguise? I gave a chance to the Nature to reclaim itself.
Mankind could see the endangered dolphin, lion, tigers and snow leopards etc. in human habitations. I urged
the arms-importing countries thinking to build industrial and military complex to spend their handsome amount on health care from their GDP.
I didn’t make any discrimination with you but see I came to know about your darker side. I saw thousands
of dead bodies flowing in the civilizational river called mother Ganga. It was because they couldn’t get the
dignified cremation and to save themselves from social stigmas and ostracism their loved ones threw them
to rivers. Although I didn’t discriminate, I attacked the world class celebrities and underdogs in same way.
Economists say I deepened inequalities. I made poor poorer and rich richer. But there can be a trickledown
effect. Can’t it be? No doubt, I questioned your healthcare system, I could see the people ready to keep
everything at stake for an oxygen cylinder which they couldn’t get. Despite this did they ever realize how
much they breathe in a day by giving uncountable externalities?
Being Homo sapiens, they might have forget everything. After all, you are now 2 lac years old over earth.
Let me remind you about your achievements and milestones during this tenure. In fact, I am the production
of your mind only. Planet earth came into existence some 4.6 billion years ago after a big bang and you
appeared on it some 200,000 years ago in Holocene. When you were only a few in number, your movements
were limited and needs only few. Every other organism including you was bestowed with everything for
individual survival and sustenance in the lap of mother earth. Did you know what happen when your greed
increased beyond your need? You started to grab other’s share of resources and space which instigated you
to encroach into the domains not meant for you. We are reminding you of your course since Industrial
Revolution of 1759. Did you look back since then even for a jiffy?
Didn’t you launch a mission to cut innumerable trees and destroy forests? Did you ever thought about
increasing carbon dioxide concentration and reduction of oxygen supplies in your atmosphere. Aren’t you
suffering presently because of immense scarcity and shortage of oxygen supplies? Isn’t it you, who made
infrastructural developments and achieved milestones of progress at the cost of other species? Did you ever
thought of any sustainable development? Instead you kept the word ‘sustainability’ limited to the talks only
in conferences and seminars and kept on escaping from the reality. Did you ever went out of the context
and ponder into your being and thought for a while that how will your coming generations as well as
millions of other species who coexist with you survive when you were busy in mesmerizing everything?
Apart from your carelessness, what all you did once you attained socio-economic and technological
maturity. Did you forget how your peers as well as your neighbors and relatives are grappled and feeling
uncomfortable by your moral, ethical and aesthetic degradation? Once you opted to flow with the flow of
modernization, did you ever ask or care about your own people or others? Didn’t the noble institutions like
family, marriage, kinship and religion lose their meaning and value once you bathed in the stream of nudity,
vulgarity and delinquency? Aren’t you friendly with illegitimate sex and pornography? Haven’t you
become addicted to drugs and other illicit habits like cybercrimes? Have you ever peeped into your
metropolitan and cosmopolitan cities? Switch on your smartphone and google about these places. Who is
responsible to develop these urban places into breeding grounds of illicit crimes, human trafficking and
flesh trade? Who has invented in them the notion of ‘time means money and money is god’? Isn’t it you
who favors individualism and pushes collectivism and traits like cooperation to its dead end in these
centers?
What about your technological endeavors? Wasn’t it you who provoked two world wars? Did you forget
those dreadful moments of August 1945 when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were almost wiped away from the
world map? Did you ever stop thereafter? Aren’t your own people suffering because of poverty, hunger,
malnourishment, unemployment and your conflicting interests that you deliberately don’t want to solve?
Did you ever check and control the menace of corruption in your offices. Haven’t you become champion
of nepotism and redtapism?
What to say about your choices? Didn’t you favor blue eyed candidates over meritorious ones? Aren’t you
responsible for uncountable suicides of toiling farmers, women and unemployed youth? Have you ever thought about industrial or commercial disasters? Didn’t humanity pay a huge price for your blunders in
Chernobyl, Fukushima, Minamata and Bhopal like tragedies? What to talk of the biodiversity of earth?
Haven’t you rendered rhinoceros, macaws, frogs, dolphins, ibex, pigeons, quaggas, tiger, turtles, sparrows
and uncountable floral species extinct? Aren’t you still on your mission of making dozens of other species
endangered?
Still if you think it is merely an allegation. Relax for a moment. Take a long breath and ask yourself who
has opted for population explosion? Who has vandalized the natural resources? Who has made
sustainability of forests, wetlands, ecosystems and even wild beasts insecure? Who is to be blamed for
creating this topsy-turvy mess? Let us not hesitate in saying spade a spade. Let me be very lucid in my
approach and declare in categorical terms that “it is your self centered nature, careless approach towards
other’s existence, consistent irresponsiveness and unwillingness to think or act judiciously that not only
your own species but also other creatures are facing immense sufferings”. You left no stone unturned in
transforming the land-use and land-cover of mother earth into waste. Every other species might be thinking
of you as a blot and burden on its beautiful face.
If you are responsible for producing all this mess, why don’t you put checks and balances on your actions?
Why don’t you think of other’s lives and sustenance as well before making any advancement in scientific,
technological, socio-economic or military endeavors for your betterment? Do you think or even feel that
none other than you wants to live in a better and stress free environment? If this isn’t the case, why are you
still unwilling to stop? Are you waiting for any messiah to hold your hand and guide you to the right path?
How long will it take for you to differentiate between what is right and what is wrong?
I will be taking a final leave. But want to keep you busy in prediction of third wave, although you got ample
time to prepare yourselves for second wave too. But no one knows with certainty when I will be knocking
again. I love to play a fiddle with you. At times, I being symptomatic and at other times being asymptomatic.
Thanks to you for giving me name Corona. Some suspect me as biological weapon, warfare or equipment,
but none could trace my origin. Before I leave, I want some indelible mark left on you by pondering over
‘live and let live principle’, use your resources judiciously and fulfill the aspirational goals of every creature.
This is the time of test and nobody is going to think and act instead of you. It is you and only you who has
to ponder deep into your existence, take a rational and justiciable stand that will ensure liberty, equality and
fraternity and right to decent life among all. It will also ensure survival and mutual coexistence of every
species and genre whom earth belongs to. After all, humans don’t have copyright of earth. Not only this, it
will also beautify human existence, his institutions and his society with high standards of cooperation,
control, morality, ethics, integrity, mutual respect as well as survival and sustenance of all. I don’t doubt
your ability or potential to cope up. After all I am your brain child only. When you could explore the lunar
surface, what audacity I have to stay for long?
(1) Dr Rafi Ramzan Dar (6005064640)
rafiramzandar@gmail.com
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