How speedily some words and phrases have become an integral part of our daily lexicon these days – lockdown, isolation, social distancing, virus, vaccines, sanitizer, the new normal ….
 
In just a little over 4 months, the war against the coronavirus has gone global, aided by none other than the human race itself, underestimating the ‘enemy’ and transporting its troops from one country to another, opening up one new front after another, until the whole world has become a battlefield. And today the battle has reached a crescendo – nearly 300,000 dead at the time of this writing and over 4 million injured. The absolute frontline soldiers, the infantry – the doctors, nurses, paramedics, are exhausted and at best are only managing damage-control, while laying down their own lives in the hundreds in the process. The generals – world leaders, far removed from the trenches and the blood, sweat and tears of the battlefield, seem bizarrely sanguine, even disconnected, content with churning out meaningless populist rhetoric.

Even as the global tragedy intensifies and the losses continue to rise exponentially, for nature the pandemic is proving to be a totally unexpected blessing; an extremely rare opportunity to regenerate and shake off to an extent, the ravages caused by megalomaniac mankind, spewing toxins into the atmosphere and into the earth, the rivers and the oceans, murdering forests and often irreversibly damaging ecosystems, all with a criminal abandon, and all in the pursuit of material well-being. The coronavirus has put a halt to this wanton rape of the planet, at least for the moment.

Home isolation for me has opened up a new world for my isolated eyes. This world was always there, but the eyes seldom registered it, focused as they were routinely on the cellphone and laptop screens, on the traffic while driving, on the faces around and the food on the table when eating out, and on a wide range of mundane everyday things.

But now the isolated eyes are looking at a world cleansed of distorting pollution and of hordes of humans everywhere, as the lockdown has forced them indoors, silenced their noise, parked their cars and planes and given a breather to nature to show itself more boldly than it otherwise does.

I spend a lot of time on our terrace, in our garden and occasionally going for brisk walks in our quiet neighbourhood streets. Walking the streets instead of quickly driving through these has revealed the existence of the palaces of the super-rich, each larger than a 5-star hotel. And I wondered if the residents ever feel even an iota of guilt at their decadent lifestyle rivaling that of Nero, when just a kilometer away are the squatter colonies of the great unwashed of this nation, with perhaps 500 or more persons living in hovels in the same ground area as occupied by one of these houses, inhabited by perhaps half a dozen? I doubt it. And then on the streets I have seen a huge variety of pedigree dogs being walked, most of them more well-bred than a lot of people one knows.

Fortunately the isolated eyes have seen many more uplifting sights too in these days. They have seen:

a half-moon in a vibrant blue sky in the middle of the day!

a mesmerizing murmuration dance across the skies. But it happened so fast I could not take a photo. Were they starlings?

our street garlanded as a long line of lignum trees flowered brilliantly, all at the same time

bougainvillea blooming brazenly in our garden

the mango tree in my neighbour’s garden fruiting profusely

the Cordia flower being brighter orange than ever before

a bumblebee pollen-feasting, oblivious to the world around

a kettle of kites riding the thermals, careening, swooping and then rising higher and higher without so much as even fluttering their wings.

4 furry kittens being born in our home even while COVID-19 rages outside.

How long will this last? How long will the eyes remain isolated before they are forced to return to a pre-COVID 19 focus? Of course one prays and wishes that the planet gets delivered from this pandemic and the suffering ends. Is it too much to hope that humanity will have learnt some hard lessons from this whole tragic experience, and life post-COVID will be more tempered and more caring, and less mercenary and exploitative?

What do you think?