Dumka: In post-Covid world, if there will be one, what will be the shape of humanity?
How many of us will survive? If someone were to ask, whether any human beings will survive, what will be our answer?
As it is, even the best of our scientists will have no answer. When they are not able to arrest the birth, growth and fast increase of a tiny virus, can we expect a cogent answer from them?
Virus, a sub-microscopic infectious agent, has been keeping the world in mortal fear for the past few months. The most brilliant among us have scratched their brains without success to understand this phenomenon. The loud-mouthed and agenda-pushing politicians have used weird means like drumming and plate beating to chase the viral menace and have, thus, made a mockery of themselves.
Hospitals are overcrowded with Covid patients. Coffins after coffins roll out of hospitals with dead bodies. Even life-saving oxygen is in short supply. WHO-banned ‘life-saving’ Remdesivir is helping the underground drug mafia to do a flourishing business.
Helpless doctors lament in empathy at the sight of death and devastation in front of their eyes. People live in panic. A mass hysteria is overtaking people at large by injecting them with the mortal doze of fear and terror as if the menace of death is staring at them. The tiny virus is feared to be waiting for them at every curb, every nook and corner, at bus stops and market places, in planes and trains, in homes and villas, in sanctuaries and pilgrim centres. Most people feel they have nowhere to hide their heads as if Covid is searching to ferret them out to take them to the netherworld.
Many are asking where the myriad gods, propitiated, venerated and adored day after day by people, have disappeared at this predicament. Some question the wisdom of political dull heads that are quick at erecting statues of dead men while neglecting to build hospitals and health clinics for ailing human beings.
Isn’t it a queer phenomenon that nations have technology at their finger tips to undertake space missions to moon and mars as if to dig out water and oxygen? People ask, of what use is that when here on earth we pollute air and water to pander to our selfish needs and create suffocating situations for all.
Many are lamenting that they cannot go to meet their gods in temples and churches even as they refuse to see the presence of a needy ‘god’ in their aged parents or hungry neighbours. Gods and goddesses have to be propitiated with drum beats and shouts as if to wake them up in festive mood by crowds even as Covid the menace is celebrating its dance of death.
But, even in this maniacal march towards the precipice, there are consoling signs of divine touch in human fellowship. A Muslim neighbourhood rising to the occasion by carrying the dead body of a Hindu neighbour to the cremation ground with the chant: ‘Ram Nam Satya Hai’. The lynching mobs hunting for Muslims’ heads might have been hiding their heads at the sight.
There are instances of ordinary individuals, with limited resources, arranging free oxygen supplies to needy patients or some charitable institutions sharing their resources to Covid affected persons or families.
In a Post Covid world, if there will be human beings remaining, it is possible to see them as one family without walls of class and caste, religion and regionalism, wealth and poverty. One believes Covid will have taught us a lesson or two in living and behaving as human beings gifted with the divine touch of human fellowship.
In the new world there may not be any need for resurrecting the gods and goddesses as long as human beings relate to one another as normal persons with sanity and sanctity. Sanctuaries and rituals should be vanishing pecks in the rear-view mirror of the new human community.
(Father P A Chacko is a Jesuit social activist working in Jharkhand state in eastern India.)