Coronavirus year is gone, vaccine year is here

When a year which was like no other in living memory has passed, the world is still in the cusp of the unknown, struggling to understand what happened, and uncertain about what will follow. Humans are slaves to calendars, and we define our years and months with our experience of them, and our perceptions and emotions. Most of the past years in history have been different to different people — to individuals, communities and countries. The year one country gained freedom from a foreign power may have been one in which another saw millions die of drought, and yet another had its coldest winter. Different individuals may have recalled the same year differently — for a birth, a bereavement or a new beginning. But there were years when a single experience defined them for everyone, like a war which was felt by all or the year man first landed on the moon. This past year was much the same for everyone in every part of the world, a year in which a thing that we did not know even existed held our lives hostage and brought the world down.

In the last century, there was a view that man had so shrunk and diminished from the previous ages that no god would leave heaven to strike him down, as in a Greek tragedy, but a lowly syphilis germ could do it, working inside man, as in an Ibsen play. That is true about this century, too. The whole world has been struck by at most 1.5 gm of virus, spread individually inside millions of bodies. It will pass eventually, but it may have foretold a future waiting in the folds of time. We may notice, going by its sway, that much of what might impact the world in the coming decades could be like it — climate change, an economic crash, or a still unknown malady that would hit everyone everywhere equally, leaving no place to hide. The irony is that the challenges would need us to respond as one, but the world, we know, is breaking up into national entities, community ghettoes, racial blocs and other silos.

We must acknowledge that the virus has made us more aware of our diminishment and our limitations. Just like the vastness of the universe, its smallness is also beyond us to handle. The virus has left us at a crossroads where we have to choose from two futures, one in which we make a common fight against the challenges to humanity, and the other in which we fight them separately as nations, communities and individuals. The first may yet provide us with grand narratives of survival and excellence, and the second may give lesser stories of struggle and strife, but still human. The choice may decide how we look at our years and shape them, and how we define our New Years in future.