B D Sharma
This is the story of the most ferocious war being fought between man, the highly developed being and us, the lowly evolved minuscules. Man pushed us to the periphery and we always remained hanging on the borderline of the animate and the inanimate. Though we faced huge humiliations at the hands of man still we continued to lie low and were satisfied with our existence even in the company of lowly placed and highly despised bats. Our existence also remained confined to a single strand of nucleotides. We were not destined to acquire even a double helix of Crick and Watson for ourselves. Despite our slight constitution we remained always envious of the highly evolved animal, the Homo sapiens who we found always erect with pride. Man proclaimed himself to be a reservoir of all wisdom and knowledge, the pioneer of development and advancements on the planet, tamer of the lions and tenacious enough to take all diseases head on. Though he caused irreparable damage to the environment, ruthlessly exploited the natural resources, caused loss to the biodiversity, destroyed the habitat, laid concrete jungles and created an imbalance in the stability of the planet yet he never thought that such ruthless behavior could also facilitate the visitations of the like of us upon him. So we set out to teach him a lesson for this effrontery and to show him his real worth.
One fine morning we accordingly decided to hit the road and chose a Wet Market in the land of the dragons as our first stop. This country is identified as the ‘father of the autocracies’, who behaves as the don of hegemony and supremacy and loses no opportunity to intimidate and browbeat her neighbours. We decided to take on this bully as our first quarry. She didn’t take a serious note of our arrival and tried to wrap our emergence there in mystery. But our strike so profusely bled her nose that our identity had at last to be revealed. We were figured out as SARS-COV-2, not much to our liking. Though we caused immeasurable damage to them yet they underreported their losses, excelling even the concealment of the actual magnitude of the massacres of the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square. Because of this nefarious game of hide and seek, she faced a lot of shame and disgrace in the comity of nations. She didn’t forewarn the world adequately of our reality. WHO did also speak her language and got unnecessarily embroiled in the mess so created by her. In the process reputation of the world body was also dashed to the ground. We kept ourselves aloof of their controversies and remained busy in our chores. After celebrating their new year with the dragons, we left for our onward march.
We proceeded westward and landed in the realm of the White. We found our new hosts to be a bunch of eccentrics who underestimated our talent and potential. Their folly helped us to have a hearty meal out of them. We caused large scale devastations there and the world got frightened of us. Alarm bells started ringing regarding our ruthless smashes. Businesses were closed, travels disrupted and the lockdowns and curfews became the order of the day. Medical facilities started to crumble. Those who took precautionary measures, got some reprieve from our wrath. Others who made fun of us and continued indulging in free mixing and partying, became our easy targets.
Simultaneously we had reached the New World also. The people there turned a blind eye to our raid and thus became our easy victims. Fortunately for us the man sitting at the helms of affairs in this country, was an embodiment of idiosyncrasies. He laughed us off and bungled his response to our onslaught. He had a very efficient machinery at his disposal but he put spokes even in their efforts also. Rather he rendered a helping hand to us in our operations. He made so much a mess of the system of managing us that people started levelling him as our facilitator. Thus we were able to bring the most advanced nation to her knees easily. Consequently our friend and well wisher got beaten with a stick in the contest of winning back his throne. We always will remain regretful for the misfortune brought by us to our dear friend, Trump.
Nature never sits idle and incorporating new changes in its domain is its wont. We are also subject to her command. So a large number of mutations took place in our pool during this campaign. Some of these changes rendered us benign and the others made us more virulent. With the most deleterious mutations in hand some of our ilk found their way to the land which proclaimed itself to be ‘the mother of all democracies’. In this way we ensured to treat both, ‘the mother of democracies’ and ‘the father of autocracies’ equitably. Despite their boasts of having established a vast empire where sun never set, they got panicked on our arrival as if a cat has been thrown among their pigeons. The world also got frightened more than before on the emergence of our new strain.
The humans had become very scared of us. They pulled out all the stops to combat us. The primitive and antiquated methods such as preparation of vaccine, the sorcerer of antigens and antibodies, were taken in hand. Even new techniques such as clapping of hands and ringing of plates, euphemistically called “Taali and Thaali Bajana” were also employed to grapple with the situation created by us. The long lost practices and potions of the yore were revived. The Ashwagandha, the Turmeric, the Giloy and the Amla, no more in much of a use became panacea for the immunity over night. Some ‘Babas’ got opportunity to promote their business empires by making tall claims that their concoctions could bring a death knell to us. Other religious leaders did also not lag behind and pronounced that people of their faith were endowed with the unique blessings of the Lord and could never be afflicted by us. No doubt the scientific research did get an impetus because of us. Apart from the traditional vaccine where inactivated, dead or portions of actual virus was used to spur an immune response, a new messenger RNA vaccine was developed for the first time. Our family shivers with fear at the mention of the name of the vaccine so getting rid of the vaccine becomes an urgent task for us. In this connection, we miss our dear friend Osama of Al-Qaida fame, yes Osama, the Abbotabadi (peace be upon his soul in the sea). He would have helped us by motivating and educating his large number of followers to defame and block the use of the vaccine as he had done against the polio vaccine amongst his followers. He would have fought in concert with us because man has always been a common enemy for both Osama and the virus.
Though we have put the all-powerful human beings on the mat yet it is our own progeny who is bent upon letting us down. Frequent mutations in our fragile constitution has given rise to two main classes, first our favourite offspring, appropriately named as the Virulent who sends the fear down the spine of human beings. The other, the spoilt one for us, known as the Benign. It is expert in ‘milding’ down the virulence. A tug of war has started between our two heir apparents. The all powerful phenomenon of Natural Selection, the brainchild of Darwin ‘Chacha’ has also lost no time in poking its dirty nose in the affairs of war of survival being fought between our two descendants. Our favourite scion , the Virulent is losing battle as the evolutionary pressure is playing its game against it. The hosts of the Virulent get seriously ill and immediately get confined, masked and quarantined. The hosts stop intermingling with the other people and thus the chain of its transmission is broken. So his spread and multiplication is cruelly checked. The shrewd Benign, on the other hand, does not cause severity. They ‘allow’ their hosts to be mildly ill. The hosts in turn facilitate the Benigns’ dispersal by moving around and sneezing and coughing over the prospective hosts. The reproduction and spread of the Benign is thereby happening at phenomenal speed. Ultimately the Benign will overrun the number of the Virulent and gradually subdue it. Our favourite scion who has the capacity to bring the human beings on the knees is unfortunately on the decline. Our own offspring is thus becoming the cause of our undoing.
The man should not, we may advise, become complacent and lower his guards. The reverse mutations can also take place resulting in enhancement of our potency. Another wave of our storm may be in the making. We will continue to record our presence whether in benign form or in the virulent form. We will always be there. There is no going back to normal for the man now.
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