THOSE DEFIANT YEARS

More deaths. Just when we thought 2020 was like a dreadful night that ended with the morning rays of 2021 that promised a better year, end of lockdowns and a world that had found a way to beat the virus. Deep down, however, we knew this wasn’t the end just yet.

Falling like pins in a bowling alley, our loved ones are getting knocked down one by one.Some sooner, some later.What was an illness that lurked in other lands claiming other peoples lives is now coming closer and closer.A distant relative, a friend’s mother, a known doctor, a person who was otherwise as fit as a fiddle, the list is endless.2021 had other plans too.Supplementing the Covid deaths are those called ‘accidental deaths’ and those caused by other illnesses.Those happen every year; this year, however, they hit home.A very dear friend died due to cancer, another friend’s husband passed away in an accident.Another doomed year? Are human beings relentless in their tolerance for suffering? How much more disease, death and loss will they have to endure before the end of the world itself?

We, the 1970’s generation, didn’t have to grow up in the midtst of a pandemic.Neither did the generation before us.Generation Z, ( born between 1997 and 2015) also called Linksters, have not only been witness to a pandemic but have also had their already waning social skills taken away from them.More comfortable with a device rather than a human, more eager to write on their laptops rather than on paper and happier to read on screen than from a book, they were losing social contact even before the pandemic arrived.Now they stand even more disadvantaged.

Despite progress in medicine, we are failing.Life expectancy has been negated by unforseeable factors.How will the kids compete in a world already dwindling in resources and suddenly overthrown by the onset of this disease?The yardstick of success and failure has changed.The measures of academics are no more the same.Lives and lifespans are changed.Life and health predictors are challenged.Nothing is the same.

Covid has cost us more than the lives of our dear ones.It has snatched away our zest for life before life itself.