The flap of a butterfly wings has orchestrated a storm, so strong in its intensity, it has shut the businesses down, made the guns silent, set the soldiers at distance and the lovers untouchable for one another. Our species, the most evolved and dominant species of the earth, is at the crosscurrents of its dominance and fragility"
A year had rolled on and no one knows yet, when this whirlwind, which had sent the world to its tailspin, will ebb away. No prediction can be made, and if there is any, it's a babel, precipitating down from the tower of babel, in a multitude of languages, incomprehensible for everyone.
Tiny things have changed the world with massive implications. The armada of transient creatures that swarm in a drop of water can echo louder than the Little-Boy delivered from the belly of Enola Gay on Hiroshima. Franisco de Egua, a single smallpox carrier, who landed in Mexico in 1520, devastated whole of Central America, killing according to some estimates up-to a third of its population. This is how the small things have had changed the world, suppressed the revolutions, geared up the industrial revolution, and forced Napoleon to retreat from his quest to enslave Haitians.
The pestilences wherever they made their inroads to human settlements, they never been respecter of status or boundaries. They, with their pure democratic nature and despotic clutches, indiscriminately entwined the world on a danse-macabre. They never shrank themselves, while claiming the lives of Roman Emperors like Marcus Aurelius and Justinian the Great. On their onslaught, they never hesitated while setting the well-connected and urbanized Roman Empire on a course of crumbling collapse. Their inaudible roars, dashed Mongol kingdoms down, ruled by the four grandsons of Ganges Khan. They blazed town after town and country after country. Wiped the entire households and military encampments alike. Vanished the world's population in millions. They made the streets desolate, fields small for burial and the corpses left strewn away for scavengers and the wild animals. They made funerals unceremonious and brief, or the deceased were piled into pits.
In this terrestrial life of ours, everything looked shipshape. Everyone busied in their concerns in a Sisyphean cycle of struggle, raising his own boulder to pay for the passions the earth. The people with their chief concern was in business and chief interest in commerce were extracting as much money they could. Men and women consuming each other in the name of love, as Albert Camus chronicles the outbreak of plague, in his novel The Plague. When out of blue, something of unknown nature to man was brew in the wet markets of Wuhan, China and soon it convulsed the world. As the culprit of Yersinia Pestis bacterium, which evolved in Central Asia, took its flight along the Silk-Routes, and reached the world. This present culprit of Covid 19 has waylaid the world, and human toll has crossed the figure of a half million, still its onslaught is continued and no one knows when it will end. All that on which we humans condescend, our marvels of science and the wizardry of weapons, is quietened by a microbe of which nature is not yielded to us, yet. It has told us that with our enormous capacity to blow the world many several times, who really we are.
At this moment in history in which humanity is more technologically powerful than ever before. This pandemic has given us a sense of dethronement that, we living on a speck of dust, in the immense vacancy of universe. We are not the masters, we are at a constant threat of being obliterated either by our own hands or by viruses, by depletion of resources or by some aliens that might be are scrutinizing and studying us, as we study microorganism under a microscope. As the Martians did in their attack on earth in H.G. Wells's novel War of the Worlds.
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