Francesca Melandri  - Italian Novelist                                                The Corona Virus is a Wake Up Call​                                                         Sudheendra Kulkarni, Spiritual Thinker

               The Enormity and strangeness of this crisis is totally incomparable, both in scale and experience.  Nobody on the planet has, in recent memory, ever lived a situation like this one: one in which all of us almost 8billion humans are exposed to the same biological danger. 

If we turn our gaze to the more distant future, the future which is unknown both to you and to us too, we can only tell you this:  When all of this is over, the world won’t be the same.

What I can foresee is only that everything will be different:  Our societies, the globalgeo political power relationships, the role of capitalism, the relationship politics has with science and scientific research.                               - Italian Novelist Francesca Melandri 

          The lockdown has turned out  to be an unexpected blessing in our hiper hierarchal and closed society that had zero qualms  about treating hired help as menials, born to clean upper class excreta .This is a very big social shift for a country where we have traditionally discriminated against those who earned their livelihood making sure middle class potties remained spotless, while the saabs and mem-saabs concentrated on more sanitized matters and stayed away from jhadoos and mops.

 All our double and multiple standards will have to be flushed down the  tube once the lockdown lifts.  Our exaggerated squeamishness towards cleaning our own crap may have to be abandoned once and for all.  Dignity of labour has always been an alien concept here.  Perhaps this is a  good time to review and reject those despicable social structures that have condemned 

such a huge section of our society, forcing people to stay abjectly poor and downtrodden through generations.  Our nasty caste system may finally get chucked ut of our narrow minds.   …We need to establish balance in our very unequal lives.  Let this new realignment not disorient us to the extent that will make people fall back on it with a vengeance once we regain our familier existence.

The word ‘co-operation; within families that had forgotten its meaning is leading to positive  lifestyle changes.           - Sobhaa De         

          US President Donald Trump Called Indian Prime Minsiter Narendra Modi to ask him to release shipments of Hydroxychloroquine tablets hoping they might be a “game changer” in the fight against Covid-19.  Whether they work or not, that call underscored how the pandemic hasturned the world order upside down.

As a new immigrant  in America in nt990’s, I was used to thinking of the US as the safe zone and India as the dangerous outback swarming with exotic diseases.  I remember pots of water being boiled at my home every time I returned to Kolkata.  Indian water was deemed unsafe for my Americanised digestive system.  It seems an ironic twist that now an American president is looking to India for help in keeping Americans safe, that too with a drug used to fight malaria.                                                - Sandip Roy

 Faced with mortal peril, there is protection only in mutual help – what the wise have called “each for all and all for each”. 

The need for this wisdom is now being acutely felt everywhere,

with the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.  The well-being of all depends on how every individual behaves, just as the safety of each individual depends on how society behaves.  Each person can become a potential carrier of the  virus and also a preventer of its spread and hence a protector of others.

The corona calamity has thus become a lesion in the unity, solidarity and fundamental equality of all human beings.  It has also brought home another lesson of inestimable value - the Power of One.  The truth that each one of us  can make a difference, not only for one’s own benefit but also for the benefit of the entire planetary population.  In normal times, most people faced with problems that seem too big to be solved by them, are troubled by the question-

 “what can I do to change the situation for the better?  I am just a small, insignificant powerless person.”           - Sudheendra Kulkarni

          We are living in extraordinary times.  The world is in the grip of a pandemic and world governments are making wide ranging efforts to control the spread of the disease and ensure the safety of their citizens.

The recent incident in Delh, capital of India, where the Tablighi Jamaat held a meeting of hundreds of followers, ignoring the Delhi government’s directive  – to maintain social distancing to prevent spread of the current novel corona virus pandemic - has led to  further spread of infection, compromising lives - aware that this disease spreads on contacts like wild fire. Following Government's order, the Jamaat should have cancel the meeting.                                                                                       - Maulana Wahiduddin Khan