A customary way of greeting on the final day of a year is always, “A Happy New Year.”
We are all done with this note of greeting, but we all know that the traumas of the earlier year, and the year before, are weighing us down.
At the global level the way covid pandemic disrupted things, and dealt a severe blow to economic, political, social and mere existential spheres of human life, it will take us good portion of the new year to finally escape the trauma.
Hopefully. And that is the global wish. In the year ahead one can pray for a final recovery from this pandemic.
The spiral of new variants and mutants that renew the worry may come to an end, and mankind may breathe the way it was, before this pandemic. But in all this praying, and all the grand wishes, there is need to bolster global response on problems like covid pandemic.
There is need to think of the entire world as a global community and worry for its well being. But unfortunately this mindset, as often highlighted by intellectuals and leaders at the global level, was found missing during these almost two years the Pandemic.
And this year also such a coming together of global powers and global institutions doesn’t seem likely.
A world that is riven with military and market competition, it becomes difficult to think of all people – above race, colour, faith, class and nationality – as equally important. This discriminatory approach is the affliction of our times.
This pandemic has driven home the point that the problems can be solved only when there is a basic change in mindset. To the extent global institutions collaborated in the fight against this virus, we saw how we could raise collective defences. And where ever we found such coming together missing, people suffered.
As we move into this new year we can pray for a world where marks of identity don’t determine the worth of human beings, but being human is considered sufficient to be though of as important.
Let this year be a year of humanity, and human interconnectedness.