Where will the world go after this pandemic? This is the question that has kept the global intellectual busy ever since covid 19 crisis deepened, and the world woke up to scary times of lockdown. At the global level what will happen, is the hot topic discussed in the international media. There is also a scathing critique of the ways of politics and economy, of industries and diplomacy, that has come to fore. The older debates of inequalities, of waging wars on powerless, and of burdening environment with an unmanageable weight of industrial activities, have surfaced up with a vengeance. People are talking about new world order, at least in terms of economic structures. What will finally happen cannot be prophesied to the last detail, but it is a given that a churning will happen.
Some intellectuals opine that the most powerful country in the world, the United States of America, will now think in terms of squeezing into itself, and changing its ways of meddling too much in the affairs of other countries. But does that mean an isolationist policy adapted by the USA will solve the global problems that we have piled up over a century. One doesn’t see any possibility of that. By just stepping out, and leaving the world to take care of itself, is not a responsible attitude. In fact the history of power says that it’s not the vacuums of power that has done any good to people. It is actually the responsible power, and a sensible global leadership, that can solve the problems at a global scale. The present world, if we momentarily take our gaze off this pandemic, is a huge jumble of humanitarian crises. Someone has to take responsibility for resolving these crises, and relieving the human world of the suffocating effects of these problems. In fact it is time that we imagine of post-pandemic politics as an alliance of efforts that come from the top and those that grow from the bottom. If the global leadership, and the civil societies at the bottom, think in tandem, may be we find solutions to long pending problems. And may be we gradually find ourselves in a world better than the one before this pandemic.