From a bruised and buffeted 2020, we are stepping into an year of hope and revival. The year of 2021 is destined to be an year of vaccination with the governments around the world busy inoculating their peoples against a virus which proved that through overwhelming, a less potent danger can be more damaging and devastating beyond our imagination. As a society, 2021 will not be a bull but a bear that is configuring to get up and start walking. Vaccine will inject the energy to get up, but to walk and run, a lot of reversals of the reversals that happened in 2020 is needed.
Looking back at 2020, nature gave man more to introspect, more to pause and ponder than to pace up. Was it long overdue from nature? It was! It is estimated that in 2019, we consumed nature’s resources like soil, clean air and water 1.75 times more than what the earth could regenerate. This level of consumption is not sustainable, so nature stepped in and did the correction by reining in man. The versatility with which the virus spread and its edging out of him in the cat and mouse game of the stop and spread demonstrate that nature was well in preparation to do this midcourse correction. But, has man learnt any lesson from it? Only will time tell if the answer to this question is affirmative or not.
There will not be a single person who had not experienced some sort of inconvenience due to the pandemic. Many lost lives, many are still losing and many more will till we get over the pandemic. One day the world will see the end of this trauma, and we will have smile, instead of masks, back on our faces. But a lesson that we should not miss to learn from this pandemic is this: live within the needs defined by necessity rather than excesses and extravaganza. Man’s greed to have more has to be curbed as all his excesses put extra and costly pressure on nature beyond its regenerative capacities.
When man exceedingly consumes beyond what nature can provide, nature presses reset button, and Covid-9 is one such reset press. If every man and woman can take a resolution to live within the needs defined by necessity and follow through it, we will be in harmony with nature and that the world will be much more livable. On this New Year’s eve, I invite all of you to take and live through this pledge: I will live within the needs defined by necessity.
My Best Wishes to you all for happy and harmonious days in 2021!
Nowhere Perspectives 