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Combating coronavirus: No planet of the apes, please

Dubai - Covid-19 is not a global punishment and we should not go into penance mode. Disease has come often and we have fought it and cured it.

This whole Covid-19 has given philosophy a huge lift. Everyone and his uncle is into penetrative mind numbing blarney about the lessons we must take on board from this blight sent to test the human resolve. So now Socrates and Plato are getting a run for their money. I am listening to Sadhguru, India's leading think guru with the light touch, and he is telling his audience that it is arrogant of the human race to think it is superior to an ant. This observation is met with a roar of approval. Not that I have ever consciously compared myself to an ant or made any conceited assessment, but then he says that if there were no human beings and we were as homo sapiens extinct the planet would thrive and flourish. This gets an even louder roar of approval from the crowd he has just by the way annihilated.

And all this stuff about bad, bad human beings is getting tedious. Without human beings there would be no thought, no articulation, no aspiration, no speech, no grandeur of language, no art, no science, no invention, a planet of nothingness.

So can we just back off the self-flagellation and take off the sack cloth and ashes and stop saying we deserve Covid-19?

No, we don't. If the healing of this bruising of the earth by our so-called plundering greed has occurred in six weeks, then the earth has the resilience and the gravel to take what we throw at it and come up sixes.

Covid-19 is not a global punishment and we should not go into penance mode. Disease has come often and we have fought it and cured it. TB, polio, small pox, mumps, measles, Ebola and this will go the same way. Because humans will find the solution. Not the ant.