Jaspreet Singh

The pandemic has pursued humans to a pressurising halt. Every new year opens a window to a fresh change. The freshness, however, in the past few years has been subdued by the devastation of forests, water bodies and climate change. Conversations about the death of life permeate all boundaries. Unfortunately, a crumbling healthcare system and the rage of our fragile planet have put us all in a tight spot.

We are witnessing many lives of death. From oxygen shortage, unavailability of beds to the sirens of ambulances and piles of dead bodies in crematoriums, human beings are gasping for breath. The fractured and crumbled lives are painted as glossy on social media. Infoxication is taking its toll on the human mind. Could we start afresh? Could we go back in time to ring out the Goliath of reckless spread? Multiplicity and mutability of the virus have left us in a time warp. Each event, coming faster than the last, seems to be shaping a world bereft of possibilities.

Questions and answers about the life of death are inevitable, considering the situation at hand. Conversations are about the virus and its pursuits. The virus has laid bare the deceptive state of living beings. All the powerful innovations — the humbug of life is submerged into a self-destructive roadmap. We all are forced to think, where does the future lie? However, the more prominent question is what led us to the present situation? Ed Young, science journalist for The Atlantic wrote in an article ‘How the pandemic defeated America’, and also tweeted in August last year, “We long to return to normal, but ‘normal’ led to this. To avert the future pandemics we know are coming, we must grapple with all the ways normal failed us. We have to build something better.”

To escape the catastrophic pandemic has become a bare human necessity. It is much of a muchness for everyone. Yet the silence on the violence against nature is baffling. Apprehensions about zoonotic diseases entering our lives are another facet of it. We tend to blame each other or neighbouring nations without any proof for the reckless spread of the virus. We have forgotten to look within. Some ideas for the future are mind-boggling like the AI-enabled future, cyborgs or post-humanism, yet no one knows exactly about the future anymore.

An unadulterated, fertile and vulnerable earth is coaxing us to nurture life. We have no other planet to go to despite our expensive missions that have polluted space. Each spring brings with it the colourful bloom. The stubbornness of life and death is incessant. It keeps renewing itself in all forms and shapes. The possibilities are with us because what still motivates our tribe is a record of survival, but not always if one ignores this tragedy and teachings it has offered.