War has been an
integral part of humanity ever since its evolution. The greatest enemy of
mankind has always been man. We have fought wars to dominate one another and
achieving war supremacy has been our prime purpose of our existence.
Until recently, War was
the only thing humanity really planned for as a universal calamity and feared would
wipe him out of existence and hence our focus has been to develop our defense
systems even at the cost of our immune systems. When bunkers were being built, quarantine
centers were the last thing on their agenda. The Defense budgets in poorer
countries far eclipsed the allocation for alleviation of poverty or even
healthcare & nutrition.
This quest for
supremacy in warfare and war time requirements has in fact stoked most of the
industrial inventions and innovations. Furthermore the concepts of war found
its way into corporate management and war analogies was used across functions
in the corporate world. We introduced corporate jargon prefixed and suffixed
with war, War Rooms, war footing, price war etc. Basic fundamentals of
negotiation of even a harmless everyday product were drawn from war time
strategies / thinking.
Most of my knowledge
of wars has been from the history books and fortunately have not found myself
in a war zone yet, the closest I got to ‘see’ a war was the Gulf War in the early
nineties, which has the credentials of being the first war to take the media by
storm and was beamed live over international and national channels. I learnt all
about scud missiles and early warning systems etc. I learnt for every Scud that
was launched there was a Patriot anti-missile system well in place.
From the first industrial
revolution of the 18th century to the most acclaimed fourth revolution more commonly referred to as
Industry 4.0, the catalyst for development has always been war time needs. Even
the first workable prototype of the Internet in the late 1960s with the
creation of ARPANET, was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense. No wonder
once a virus hits the internet, an anti-virus patch is made available within
hours by the Kasperskys and the McAfees of the world.
Man fears War more than anything in this world and this
fear is the one that sells the most, that’s the reason why even a small civil
war happening in the most insignificant of regions of the world finds its way
to the front pages and primetime media and not the news of starvations or an epidemic
in some deep corners of an under developed part of the world. That’s the reason
why I feared for my life when Gulf War happened thousands of miles away from where
I was. This is why, even when we had enough early warnings in the form of SARS
/ MERS & Ebola we did very little and waited for it to blow over and
scorned it as just another flu. The virus did not instill the same sense of
fear or urgency a war would into our psyches.
Today, even when the whole of humanity is held to ransom
by a virus which has claimed lives equivalent to war time causalities; I still don’t
see the same fear that war would bring in the eyes of humanity. They certainly
are worried, but not frightened. The dalgona challenge, cooking adventures,
fitness histrionics etc that are making the rounds on the internet just show that
while we are trying to stay away from the virus we are not as much perturbed by
it. Can you imagine indulging in such frivolous pastimes when missiles fly over
your skyline and tanks roll down the highways?
In pursuit of our Industrial and War time supremacy we
have under invested time and money into basic health care and the wellness of
humanity. We have a wrist watch that measures our BMI or the steps we take but
cannot detect viruses we touch. Industries were too focused on lifestyle diseases
rather than life threatening diseases. When Industry 4.0 was happening we forgot
to develop our Life Sciences 4.0 or Values 4.0. The harsh reality is that a Premier
League football club and its players earn more than a Bio-Science researcher.
Finally, the irony is that we are now fighting a Virus
from War rooms that were set up on a War footing but continue to carry out ‘Surgical’
strikes with ‘clinical’ precision during a war! Sadly humanity is gifted with
short term and preferential memory; that’s why, memories of World Wars and
other wars outshine the great plague or even the Spanish Flu. A Corona Virus memorial will not kindle the
same emotion in a human as visiting a War memorial.
