My cousin and his wife, living in the US, had bought
tickets to come to India on the 23rd March 2020. Then came the
deluge, what my cousin called the pralaya. Visit YouTube for a visualization https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9D5sqgqEYA ,
but don’t take it literally. What descended on us this time was what our prime
minister correctly named a MahAmArI, a plague!
Widespread disease and death is
not a stranger to India. Tuberculosis has been killing over 200,000 Indians
every year over the last few years.
What is new now in the case of Covid-19? A worldwide
response based on a few widely accepted ideas. One powerful idea is that of the
germ theory of disease, in this case that the infection is caused by a virus. The
other is an idea of a very fast and exponential spread of infection. The idea
that the disease could spread even ten times within two or three weeks. That it
could kill hundreds of thousands in a month or two. Such evidence-based
understanding of a pandemic has been rare in the population as a whole.
The author Yuval Noah Harari has argued that only humans
are capable of cooperation on the large scale and in a flexible manner,
including cooperation with strangers. The use of sophisticated language for
communicating a variety of ideas no doubt makes this possible. The worldwide
modification of behavior, including lockdown on a very large scale, social
distancing, use of masks and frequent handwashing with soap have not been
adopted as fast anywhere earlier as they took place over the last few months.
They were never as effective. The cooperation went beyond all forms of
tribalism and nationalism. The phenomenon clearly demonstrated what Harari had
described.
Social engineering has succeeded where genetic
engineering is asking for 18 months to produce a usable vaccine!
Is this a turning point in human history? What can we
achieve if we perfect this technique, communicating with people, persuading
them to do work together to achieve a common goal?
Can we defeat an enemy like
tuberculosis? It is a disease with strong socio-economic dimensions. It does not
yield to any simple treatment with one or two medicines. Human commitment and
social care would probably be essential to defeat it.
I have a glimmer of hope, that Indo-Sapiens will at last
be able to do something in this direction.
Srinivasan Ramani
