New Year Euphoria

There is a feeling in the air that Covid is on its way out, if not gone already. Balaji my friend, said 'Sometimes I do wonder did Covid really hit India!' It is funny how the mask is more symbolic than a protection. Quite a change from the earlier days. I remember how Tara asked me to shower after I came up from the basement. I had just gone down to start my car!

I had even raised objections in the bank for allowing a customer in who had a mask on his beard instead on his mouth and nose. (Even at more serious times most people on the road kept their nose free!). In my recent visit to the same bank, I did not even notice that some activists who had surrounded the manager with a plea to use only Kannada while dealing with customers, had only covered their chins with a mask! 

In fact, my worries for the aged starts now! Earlier I suspected that the diktats for the old to stay home was more to protect themselves and more so their little off-springs. We were called the high risk people with co-morbidity. The word actually makes it sound worse! It was also to buy time to create infrastructure to deal with a pandemic.

We are too close to the event to know how well the Covid threat was dealt with. Only time will tell who managed it right and who blundered! However it was reported by WION that P.M. Narendra Modi is voted by a poll as the best among the 13 world leaders studied!

To my observation in my earlier blog that population and economics didn't seem to have a bearing on the mortality rates, it was said that perhaps numbers were fudged as required by the top!  

The fast tracking of approvals of various Vaccines offers hope for the future, but, I still do not hold out much hope that normalcy will be achieved even by 2022. What will be the shape of the World and businesses by then is rather difficult to predict. The point remains that we will have lots of changes in lifestyles but it is difficult to say what it will eventually be like. The only thing to do is be grateful for what you have or can have rather than whining about what you have lost.......Prakash Kamath

In my lifetime I have seen humans suffer due to absolute greed, tyranny, and plain misuse of military power. The cycle repeats itself. In the next design of this universe, why not do away with the tyrants etc., with not even a trace of any of them? ....Planet Earth would last longer. But we humans are so stupid, we will destroy ourselves. .....Keshi (Dai)

While Prakash, our tennis buddy is pragmatic, my cousin Dai hopes for fundamental changes on our planet earth. It is true that in the short term Prakash has the right advice. I do dream with Dai we start looking at ourselves very differently in the future if we need to survive as humans! Yes, Sapiens won the war of survival, but I repeat that we need to mend our ways.

I am obsessed with the population growth, and we need to start working on it fast. In spite of all the (self claimed) wisdom and knowledge it is clear we have messed up big. Not that we have not been warned, right from the times of Vyaasa  of Mahabharatha fame

I feel sad to be part of a century which allowed
more than tripling of population to happen!
 In the past 100 years the wise-men had either gone to sleep or lacked gumption!