Oh Corona!

One of the big fall outs of the current Corona virus situation is the need for social distancing. People are being advised to stay indoors, work from home, avoid travel and not to go to crowded places or large congregations.

The maid doing household chores at our place travels all the way from Virar by train and has no option to avoid crowded places (read train here) or travel and doesn’t have the luxury of working from home. Ditto our driver, who also comes from Nalla Sopara. Our milkman doesn’t travel from a distance, but has to come nonetheless to deliver milk at our place. Roads are slightly less congested and traffic lighter, but cops and traffic boys and girls are still required on the roads to manage traffic, especially on difficult stretches. There are social media posts on doctors taking all the risks and serving humanity. Above all, there are daily wage earners – construction and road workers, vegetable and fish vendors, auto and taxi drivers etc, who simply cannot follow the advisory to sit at or work from home for they need to go out to fend for their daily bread!

School and college children can rejoice this unscheduled holidays; IT folks can work from home; white collared people can relax at home and enjoy this break; but in a country like ours, there’s hardly any social or governmental support system that can help millions of underprivileged, daily earners, high at risk denizens sustain this sudden stoppage of normal life!

Corona virus has brought to the fore the extreme vulnerability of the mankind to survive in the face of adversity. This Corona related emergency will end one day, but misery of humans may not if we do not imbibe the learning from this! And mind you it’s not just about personal hygiene, cleanliness and healthy lifestyle habits! It’s about how we treat our natural resources and planet in general! It’s a message that has doom written all over it and only mankind can reverse this!

Read a beautiful verse sent by a friend on WhatsApp yesterday that reads: