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The word play on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel is ironic in many ways. Fear and not love is the predominant emotion around the country. In many respects, fear is more contagious than any virus, let alone any sentiment. It is a gut reaction that will creep into the heart and soul of anyone that chooses to even partially engage in it.
It will then mutate and assume proportions that are no longer useful to an individual. In essence, fear is of utility only when kept on a leash. In this respect, it not very dissimilar from the immune system itself. The key to combating any infection is to have a well regulated immune system. An excessive immune response can result in damage to the body’s vital organs of catastrophic proportions. The ‘cytokine storm’ occurring in most people who have succumbed to this virus is a classic example.
A colleague of mine compared this novel version coronavirus to a tornado, in the sense that it can simultaneously disrupt one household while leaving another in its path virtually unscathed for no obvious rhyme or reason. It is no doubt astounding that a submicroscopic particle that would need to skirmish to be incorporated into a class of ‘living’ organisms, now has the entire civilized world of ‘evolved’ organisms at its mercy. I tend to think of this virus as almost the perfect criminal. One recalls Agatha Christie make mention of this concept in ‘Curtain’, Hercule Poirot’s last and greatest case.
The impeccable criminal has a flawless technique wherein he can commit a crime but never be implicated for the same. He does so by mastering the art of indirect suggestion where he himself does not commit the felony himself but manages to insidiously plant an idea for the same in the subconscious mind of an unsuspecting third party, a form of hypnosis if you may.
Much like Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello. SARS-CoV-2 has similarly perfected the art of causing a pandemic. If it were as lethal as Ebola, it would have been stopped in its tracks. But instead, this virus seems to have borrowed its propensity to craftily spread from the earlier corona viruses but escalated the damage it could cause ever so subtly that most countries were lulled into a false sense of security, enforcing social distancing measures only when too much of the populace had already begun to asymptomatically disseminate it.
The paradox is mind boggling. An era of human kind that can accurately describe cosmological events till the Planck epoch just after the Big Bang, a generation that can ‘bio print’ essential organs has been brought to its knees by an ‘organism’ at the very edge of life.
Great adversity also brings out the best in us. First responders, healthcare workers, countless ‘essential workers’ diving headfirst into the trenches to counter the faceless enemy. With guidelines changing on an almost daily basis, protocols have had to be implemented on the fly. Many have volunteered to work in the so called ‘hotspots’.
It is a sacrifice of monumental proportions. It is one thing to put oneself in harms way, It is another to expose one’s near and dear ones to discernible risk. Most of these frontliners have homes to return to, aged parents to care for, kids to nurse and households to run. This cannot be merely a call of duty. There is something more involved.
Love perhaps. In its truest and most platonic sense.I dare to use the word ‘Agape’. Expertise is being shared across continents over the internet like never before. Benefaction from the world’s elite hitherto unseen. Companies throwing laissez faire economics out of the window and instead contributing to production of personal protective equipment. Countries showing solidarity beyond United Nations conventions.
Journalists reporting at grave personal risk. Grocery workers slogging overtime, unsung amidst the turmoil. It can only be love. Love for one’s fellow being. Love for humanity. Love in the time of corona.
These pieces are being published as they have been received – they have not been edited/fact-checked by ThePrint.
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