War and Virus

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 18^th 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.