The Corona outbreak is certainly the most extraordinary, unprecedented and catastrophic event of our times. Most of us haven’t seen anything of this scale, magnitude and impact in our lives. The dramatic spread of the contagion and the anxiety the virus has generated has never been experienced before. India, with its’ limited resources but un-limited social capital & resilience is courageously responding to the disaster. Our brave foot soldiers – health & sanitation workers, doctors, nurses, law enforcing agencies essential service providers are risking their lives and making great sacrifices to make life go on and contain the disease. The ordinary citizens are not only cooperating with the authorities but also cheering up those in public service. There are extraordinary stories of ordinary people responding to our PM’s call of ‘Karuna in times of Corona’ by helping those in distress. Neighborhoods and enclosed societies are showing extraordinary restraint and cooperation amid isolation and lockdown.  Giving paid leave to the domestic helps and employees, sharing experiences, inspiring and cheering by social media posts have become the new ways of civic contribution in these trying times. The governments (center and the states) are trying their best to tackle the situation and deal with emergent crisis. Our PM has led from the front by communicating directly with the people, constantly interacting with those in charge of managing the outbreak at all levels and gearing up the government machinery for all future needs.  So far, compared to global havoc, the situation in India has been relatively contained. However, the unprecedented occurrence has also precipitated a global crisis of imagination. Nobody has memories of anything like this before, so nobody knows what course the outbreak would take and when and how it would end.

That said, much before the recent COVID-19 pandemic, the anxious times we are living in had already inspired and would continue to inspire myriad apocalyptic narratives in the popular culture, fiction and cinema. Serious scholars and experts, on the other hand, have been prophesizing many future trends and scenarios. As the German sociologist Ulrich Beck puts it – we are living in a “risk society” which continuously and critically reflects on the modern, taken-for-granted structures and ideologies like globalization and global economic order, power and capacity of national governments & international institutions, progress of science & technology, and above all, our understanding and control over nature. The popular culture of the last three decades, is replete with what critic & writer Dahlia Schweitzer calls the ‘outbreak narratives’ of globalization, terrorism & conspiracy. Some of the recent narratives pertain to widespread apocalyptic viruses and zombie occurrences (a metaphor may be of unknown virus?). Some of these have actually foretold the current crisis. Take for example the Steven Soderbergh directed movie Contagion (2011) which has caught the popular imagination for its uncanny similarity to the genesis of Corona virus outbreak (if one believes the media accounts). The last scene of the movie ominously traces the outbreak to destruction of natural habitat by a global corporation in China bringing bats and humans in close contact through the food chain. Another fictional work which has seen a renewed interest is Richard Preston’s novel “The Cobra Event” (1998) about an act of conspiracy of releasing a lethal genetically engineered fictional virus (a fusion of contagious common cold and virulent smallpox). Curiously as suggested by the book, (though there is no evidence at all) the social media and the informal grapevine is replete with all kinds of conspiracy theories. Not only this, the accusations and insinuations (as to who is responsible?) are being exchanged even at the leadership levels. Richard Preston’s work had in 1990s brought into focus and made bio-terrorism an essential part of US defense strategy. It is very curious that the “Cobra Event” was preceded and succeeded by other fact and research based non-fictional works like The Hot Zone (1994, origin of Ebola), The demon in the Freezer (2002, eradication of smallpox and its continuous survival in research labs) and the recent Crisis in the Red Zone (2019, on how Ebola is continuing and may jump continents). The non- fictional accounts interspersed with the novels & fictional works has blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction in the popular imagination and discourse.

While it remains to be seen how long the current pandemic would last, and what would be its eventual socio-economic and human consequences, the experts are already predicting the shape our lives and societies are going to take in the post- Corona world. The pandemic has necessitated wide-spread use of IT and AI assisted tracking which has led Yuval Noah Harari, author, historians & social-scientist, to predict in an article in FT a “surveillance society” emerging in the post-corona world. The world economy has received a beating and global supply chain has taken a blow. The impact on the global economic order has spurred author, investor, and watcher of the world-economy Ruchir Sharma to comment that the modern economic history of the world would accelerate (the already existing) trend of de-globalization. He contends that the future economic history of the world be divided into pre and post watershed event of COVID-19 as AC/BC (after & before corona).  

Hopefully, the current storm will pass and all of us are hoping and praying that it passes sooner than anticipated. However, beyond the management of current crisis, we should re-imagine and brace for the future. A future where definition of basic safety net would include not just food & shelter but also energy and connectivity for periods of voluntary isolation. A future, where education and work would shift its focus from time to attention and from place to space. Where working or studying remotely becomes more and more acceptable. A future where citizens and governments, clients and business conglomerates, individuals and global institutions interact more and more in the digital space. A future where access to information, data protection, Privacy, net- neutrality and digital democracy becomes abiding concerns. A future where we hopefully understand ourselves and our world, not only in a better and deeper way, but also in a more meaningful co-existing/co-surviving paradigm. A future which may change the global economic order and alter the current global supply chain but which retains and enriches the global- collaboration arising out of our inter-connectedness and enhances consciousness of our shared future. ‘Homo sapiens’ have mastered the earth and enjoyed fruits of nature through astonishing and sophisticated levels of coordination. It is time, we save our future through a more nuanced understanding of essential unity of all living beings and our inseparability with nature. It is time we realize both destructive and creative potential of the forces at our command.   

As Bertrand Russel once said – “The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation”

Are we prepared?