COVID19… Life 2020 & Beyond…

COVID-19 or coronavirus is a name that most of us are aware of these days (except for perhaps the Jarawas tribe of Andaman Islands and the likes)- be it due to the rising death-count or the forced stay at home. It’s the same old coronavirus that causes common cold and also caused the MERS (2012) and SARS (2002) outbreaks. We are all confused, scared, worried and frustrated due the increasing COVID-19 infections and the forced home quarantine we are facing. But let me assure you that this is not the first pandemic in earth’s history when people are in quarantine and alas, won’t be the last… What we all are feeling these days -

My house, my cage!

I want to toil, I want to go out,

I want to socialize, I want to go out,

I want to frolic, I want to go out,

I want to feast, I want to go out…

But,

Sickness and death, I fear,

For my friends and family, I despair,

For what the future holds, I doubt,

Looms above my head are dark clouds,

And my cage is my own house…

Earth has had almost 19 Pandemics (that I could find about) starting with Antonine Plague (CE165–180) to COVID-19 (CE2019-…) killing from few hundreds to several millions of people in each pandemic. The higher the death toll, greater was the scare caused by the pandemic. Whenever the death toll ran in millions, people went in self or forced quarantine. So, what did people do in quarantine when there was no social media and internet to keep them entertained — they became more productive (Isaac Newton wrote theory of gravity), some wrote famous books (William Shakespeare wrote King Lear), artified the pandemic (Edvard Munch painted Self-Portrait with the Spanish Flu), weaved their pandemic experiences into beautiful plays (Thomas Nashe wrote Summers’ Last Will and Testament),… and many more.

Now, most of you must be thinking, but I am not famous writer, poet, scientist or painter, what can I do during this quarantine?? There is nothing special or significant I can do during this quarantine time…

That’s not true, we all can do many things that we never imagined we were capable of doing. It all depends on how open you are to your own self. Let’s see what we all ‘the common people’ can do during the quarantine. But we aren’t going to talk about the very big things some famous people can do, rather about the small things we can do.

1) Build healthy relationships with our own family — why are we feeling stuck in our own nests? Why isn’t our family the gathering we can enjoy? Why isn’t home cooked food the feast that we can relish? Why are we not happy in the company of the life partner we chose to spend our life with?

All this is because we are so focussed on forming relationships outside our home that we forgot to foster the basic unit of society ‘our family’. This quarantine is giving us time to mend those broken threads and make our family lives also a pleasant and beautiful experience of our life.

2) Create lifetime memories — First and foremost, as this is such a unique time of our lives, the memories we create during this period are never going to fade. We were busy enjoying our fast-paced lives while complaining about the lifestyle diseases it is creating for us. During this time, while living without malls, pubs, restaurants, cinemas, clubs — are we realising that we can survive without them? It’s not the usual holiday or break we plan, it’s the much-needed forced break that nature wants us to take. Let’s make the best out of this time and focus on things we kept postponing stating our lack of time.

3) Let the nature repair itself — we aren’t just polluting earth; we are also halting its self-cleaning mechanism. This is proven by reclamation of sea shores by whales and dolphins, rivers cleaning themselves, sea water going to its original pristine colour, etc in such a short time. Are you realising how enchanting it is to see nature repair itself — something we never thought is possible over our lifetime is happening in few weeks! We need to rethink if the constantly increasing human activity is really worth it. Are we all going to die if we reduce industrial activity (once in a while) and give earth time to repair itself?

4) Learn from the resilience of our kids — we adults always thought kids need to learn from us. All parenting gurus say do as you want your kids to do. But this is the time to learn from our kids. They are the ones who can barely understand what is happening but are still pretty resilient and accepting this homestay without much complaints. They are still cheerful (most of the time) and try to find ways to keep involving us with them.

All this is what we can and should do during this quarantine time, but what after we have found some solution — should we go back to our old lifestyle or find a new sustainable way of living?? First question would be, ‘what is wrong with how we were living before Coronavirus pandemic?’…

The biggest issue that is causing big chaos in our world is our unsustainable way of life. One of the examples is a report by David Pimentel1, professor of ecology in Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, which was presented at the July, 1997 meeting of the Canadian Society of Animal Science in Montreal. The report clearly states that, “If all the grain currently (in 1997) fed to livestock in the United States were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million”. The report further states’ “Grain-fed beef production takes 100,000 litres of water for every kilogram of food. Raising broiler chickens takes 3,500 litres of water to make a kilogram of meat. In comparison, soybean production uses 2,000 litres for kilogram of food produced; rice, 1,912; wheat, 900; and potatoes, 500 litres.” In 1997 US population was 273 million — this statement alone tells us how gross underutilization of the capability of the food grains we are doing. From a statement by the former CEO of Citibank, Phillip Wollen at St James Ethics Centre and the Wheeler Centre debate in Australia on May 16, 2012 said, “The corn grown in poor countries is exported to the west as livestock feed while kids in poor countries are dying of starvation. CO2, Methane, and Nitrous Oxide from the livestock industry are killing our oceans with acidic, hypoxic Dead Zones. 1 billion people today are hungry. 20 million people will die from malnutrition. Cutting meat by only 10% will feed 100 million people. Eliminating meat will end starvation forever.”

The above examples along with the self-cleaning happening in the forests, seas and rivers in such short time (due to low human activity) tell us that we humans (the Homo Sapiens species) are using our natural resources in the most inefficient ways. This is causing severe damage to the mother earth and our own kind too. We need to take a pause and re-assess our ways to reduce the damaging impact of our species on earth. A sustainable way of life that provides equal right of living to every living being, be it our fellow humans, animals or birds, will have multi-fold benefits for everybody.

I would like to end with few lines from ‘Untitled by Kitty O’Meara (2020)’

And the people healed. And, in the absence of people living in ignorant, dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways, the earth began to heal.

And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again, they grieved their losses, and made new choices, and dreamed new images, and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully, as they had been healed.