We live in ordinary times


Spare the fundamentals, snare the fundamentalist!
Homo sapiens began their evolution chain as liberal foragers. Liberal instincts dominated our social precincts. With experience, home sapiens realized that they had a higher probability of getting killed by the recalcitrant fellow homo sapiens than by a ferocious feline! Their survival instincts caused them to sacrifice “individual liberties” to create a society with a set of shared values. They adorned uniforms, saluted a flag,  inherited occupation, paid extortion money called taxes with a hope that when apocalypse hits us, the guy who stays next door will come and stand in front of our door as we have shared set of values. A social and emotional insurance of sorts. In our many millennium of unchallenged domination of earth, we seem to have forgotten that we are dependent on our neighborhoods for our survival. This pandemic is a harsh reminder that we are a subset of a commune.  Community is helping us stay immune, while waging a war on our behalf. Social co-operation and strong governments will be a winning theme in the days to come. This liberal trope of limited government and data privacy will take a knock. This is an opportune moment to spare the fundamentals (of democracy) and snare the fundamentalist (extreme liberal positions)!

Is the cure worse than the disease? – Donald Trump
It is un-intellectual to quote Donald Trump. With a fair degree of remorse and stigma, here I am asking the same sacrilegious and inappropriate question of our times – Have we over reacted to the pandemic? Have we killed our livelihoods in an effort to save lives. More fundamentally, is lives any valuable without the livelihood? Intellectuals have belted out statistics of how crossing a road is more dangerous, did we stop building roads? TB kills more people, have we stopped our poor from languishing in dirty water and squalor? This disproportionate lock down response is clearly because it is possible to do so today than anytime before in the history of home sapiens. As a forager and as a farmer, we had no choice but to step out for survival. When the Spanish flu and the plague hit us, the choice was between poverty and the pandemic. Poverty won!

We live in the most normal of times
Charles Dickens said – we live in the best of time and the worst of time. Would it have pricked your ears, if he had said these are the most normal of times. That wont be an eloquent prose, would it? Every generation has an exaggerated sense for the importance of its times. That is why we should dispel an oft repeated idea that a virus has changed the course of the history or altered the world. The post Covid world will be highly normal albeit with some minor changes of course. The face mask might make its way to the Paris fashion week.  A social distancing app that buzzes when the microbe wall is breached could become the next unicorn. Knowing humans, we can contemplate a marketing campaign around #thegreatlockdown festival in April. The lockdown anniversary could be celebrated with gusto including a ceremonial one day lockdown and massive shopping frenzy to celebrate lockdown. Stories and poems will be written about the valor and indefatigable human spirit (The nursery rhyme Ringa roses was conceived as a stark reminder of the Plague). Barring these changes, the world's foundation will remain unaltered. It is humans basic instinct to step out, discover the world and repeat the same mistakes over and over again. If we were to learn from history, Quite clearly wars won’t have broken out, debts wont have been taken, humans won’t have gotten up every time they fell.  

The office will not die, leaders won’t be leaders if they don’t get the dopamine shot from meeting their masses. People will travel extensively, there will be large gatherings and congregations.  As the novelty around the novel coronavirus and the recency bias wears off, people will seek normalcy over despondency. We will eventually cauterize the corona from the mental blood stream.


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