APRIL 1, 2020
KARO-NA! A Game of Fooling
April 1, is a day of fooling around. Now, the question is - who is going to fool whom? Only time will tell; human or Corona. One thing which can be said with certainty, even if humans are able to fool Corona at some stage, this scourge is going to have some laughs till then.
See! How clever this virus is, as it is changing its colour every second and its steps of moving ahead are not leaving any footprint except map of destruction and carnage. In some places, where humans have succeeded to some extent in dealing with its pranks, it is raising its head again and that too vengeance. Look - what it is doing to deceive people; there are no standard or differentiating symptoms by which one can treat it different from its other family members; once it comes to life it stays alive for different periods on different surfaces and humans are unable to gauge what (when) to touch and what not; it is separating people and creating divide among them, so that they cannot help each other. It is really hitting hard! and when it is not in office, it is resting in our minds and producing its worst effect - FEAR.
Consequences of this fooling by Corona - humans are locked down, the world has stopped moving, and human intelligence is crawling in front of its sweep. However, we are humans and have handled these kinds of pranks in the past and emerged TRIUMPHED, maybe with some loss. We may be down but certainly not out! and yes, the game is not over yet.
Where are we in this game? We are using all our might in spite of bruises. Lying low, working stealthily to create that one weapon (vaccine) to kill this monster. Till then we are learning to deal with this prankster. Israel has created Hamagen (Hebrew for “the shield”), which using geolocation technology informs users about points of contact with the disease. We are studying voice samples of infected people in various stages of illness and samples from non-infected people are currently being collected, to develop an AI based algorithm to detect vocal “fingerprints” of this silent killer. Many startups are working on technologies to identify and ear mark infected people and their movements, respectively. We know that these are short term cheating avenues, but we need to cheat; this is a game of survival!
Our extras or bench sitting players are not realising that this virus is not playing this fooling game by any set of rules. Rather, it is defying old norms of earlier similar matches between the two. These players are going to pubs, markets, getting married, teaching their dogs to drive etc. They are putting humans to risk even when they are sitting in the last corner of earth, which is virus free (Palau - island in the Northern Pacific). Interestingly, even captains are not taking this game serious enough and measuring the outcome on an economic scale. Rather, they are fooling themselves and not realising that it’s a game of human survival, honey!
Till now, virus is up in the game after a few rounds, but I must compliment our few players for showing courage, empathy, and dedication for humanity. It is not that only centre-forward, who are STEM majors are playing well but our SSH (Social Sciences and Humanities) players are tactically contributing to the game and emerging as heros as well. With the Olympics out of the calendar, we have only one game to play, which is not over yet.
Final round belongs to us! Humans.