New Year, New Vision

In a world ravaged by the coronavirus, there is no other option but to build back better

- Sreeram Chaulia

As the coronavirus pandemic brought the world to its knees with relentless ferocity in 2020, a collective cry of anguish arose about this annus horribilis. We all desperately wanted the ill-fated year to end and turn a page in the calendar, hoping for better tidings this year.

Yet, we are entering the New Year amid devastating second and third waves of the virus pummelling the United States, Europe, and Latin America, and dire forewarnings of intensified pain and suffering with rising infections, deaths, and shutdowns in coming months. The much-touted return to normalcy is a distant dream.

Even the sunniest optimists are realising that we are in the middle of a once-in-a-century crisis that marks a fundamental break in human history. Underestimating the pandemic and denying its seriousness was a fatal error many individuals, governments, and corporations committed in 2020 and ended up paying a heavy price.

In the New Year, the primary requirement for survival is an attitudinal shift. We must put our heads down with humility and accept that we have brought upon ourselves a calamity like no other in modern times. Through acts of hubris, callousness, negligence, and selfishness, we dug ourselves deep into a hole. Even as the vaccines for Covid-19 gradually bring relief, there is little room for complacency and repetition of mistakes that accumulated over time and erupted in the form of the mass killing virus.