NL Editorial
In the human made calendar, the transition from one year to another is most often seamless with no big break from the immediate past, though the shift from 2020 to 2021 was exceptionally under focus due to the nightmare the humanity faced of Wuhan-Virus-pandemic. Nonetheless, this transit point in time does offer a vantage position to assess and assimilate the kind of worst times that we lived in. We all know no New Year starts on a clean slate and it does have salvage of good and bad incidents carried over from the preceding year. 2021 too would have carried forward imprints of the past from Covid-19 to the New Covid Strain-20, though none can predict what fresh tidings, good and bad, the year has hidden in its unknowable womb.
The most visible negative signs of the times are disruption of life, untold miseries, demolition of health infrastructure, no matter it is a rich or poor country; virus infecting all without any distinction; death of nearly two million people; rendering millions jobless; forced closures of businesses; shattered economies and huge development & resources got wasted.
Fear of Covid roaring with its mutated co-brother ‘New Strain’ is looming large on humanity as it has travelled to all sides from the UK. The two walk hand in hand into the ending year’s sunset and are likely to emerge with greater gusto at sunrise of the ensuing year.
The happy news about the current challenge is that it has fostered unity among the nations to contribute their fullest to get the people rid off Covid monster.
Intense panic and anxiety world over rendered the Medical Research no longer confined to US and Europe but encouraged many countries to thrust their talent available to come out with the Covid vaccines. And in a globalised and integrated web world, there are no elite inventors with propriety over some idea, but hordes of talented ones keep contributing to an ever enlarging pool of knowledge and know-how to meet this unprecedented challenge.
India too is in the forefront of its fight against the Covid. Thank God, its scientists have already come out with a vaccine, the dry run of which has started in four of its states. It is on the threshold of rolling out its grand vaccination programme. However, it would be a Herculean task for the government to save it from way-laying by VIPs. Influential and wealthy people may sabotage the fair and need-based distribution system. Pharma and other mafias may cause some artificial short supply. Hopefully, the authorities should remain alert to check any such attempt.
A large section of people still remain on the wrong side of the economic and health divide. But the challenge to make vaccines fairly available and affordable to the commoners should also be taken up vigorously and honestly.
Let us, therefore, look forward to an event filled but surely a safe and secure 2021.
– Rattan Singh Gill
