One human race. Frail and fragile?
In the war that is raging across the planet, the enemy, for a change, is not an insider. The invincible human being has been humbled.
As a virus sweeps across continents striking at the heart of our beliefs about life here, humanity finds itself startled at its own frailty.
While countries close their borders and ask people to stay at their homes, uncertainty has emptied markets in the midst of unprecedented lockdowns. In the face of an invisible enemy, the human race, caught off-guard, has unified like never before to defend its humanness.
At this imperilled moment, is the planet at the cusp of a new dawn? A dawn that can usher a new era of peace and love.
Over the last several years, the world stage has witnessed relentless conflicts. Conflicts that raged across continents, that flourished both within and across borders, ironically, in the name of peace, security and God.
As these conflicts wiped out millions of lives, the human mind busied itself with us versus them. It saw more and more enemies that needed to be set straight. It sought revenge to make it all even.
Instead, if societies invested resources spent on conflicts for advancing science and tightening the social fabric, our world could have better dealt with the pandemic gripping it today. Human race has far greater enemies in hunger, inequity, and climate change than in fellow human beings.
In the spirit of vasudhaiva kutumbakam, time is ripe to move from “I” to “we”, from the pursuit of self-interest to advancing the interest of all. Keeping aside differences, our generation has to accomplish the vision of harmonious peaceful co-existence for posterity.
Whether we are Muslims, Hindus, Americans or Indians, the human spirit within binds us together to make us strong. Infighting is no longer tenable.
From the depths of this conviction, a new dawn, that abounds in the light of love, can rise for humanity.
An earlier post titled “Courage, Fear, and the World To Come” is here.
