This weekend was the first one post-corona lockdown when the malls across the nation opened. After being locked out of my favorite weekend haunt, Vasant Kunj malls, it was an opportunity to revisit them after a gap of almost three months.
The visit, however, shattered my happy thoughts and associated emotions with the place. Not even a single restaurant was open, whereas only a few shops had dared to resume business. The mall, which usually bustles with shoppers, was devoid of people. In fact, visitors could be counted on fingers.
This is not how I pictured the unlock to happen in the national capital.
We had successfully bounced back from the Parliament attack, Sarojini Nagar bombings, and other terror strikes within days. But now the situation looks bleak.
Over the past several decades, terror organizations have tried to change the way democratic countries behave and people over there live. By repeated attacks on common citizens and institutions of various democracies, terror outfits tried to terrorize us and change our lives.
Terrorists tried hard to make citizens of democratic countries to stop going to markets, stop flying, or travel in any other manner. They targeted our airplanes, our tourist spots, our cinemas and markets with impunity. However, all terror outfits—Al Qaeda, ISIS, LTTE, Lashkar, Jaish, Babbar Khalsa, et al—proved insufficient in muzzling this spirit.
However, the novel coronavirus, also known as the Chinese virus, did what the bombs and bullets of terrorists couldn’t do.
It is also evident that the Chinese government did it deliberately. Chinese Communist Party bosses knew way back in December last year how deadly the virus was, the reason they were able to restrict its spread. Sample this: about 97 per cent deaths in the country happened in the Hubei province in which lies Wuhan, the epicenter of Covid-19. While fewer than 20 persons died in Shanghai and Beijing, a few hundred miles from Wuhan, thousands perished thousands of miles away in New York.
Did the Chinese unleash the coronavirus as a weapon? Nobody knows for sure, but it is indisputable that they did weaponize it by knowingly letting it spread.
Therefore, without firing a shot, CCP thugs have managed to badly damage the strongest economies of the world and undermine the core values of democracies, turning them into authoritarian replicas of China. Never before in the history of mankind have such lockdowns been imposed, adversely affecting billions of people.
Our only hope lies in conserving our various freedoms, civil liberties, and democratic rights. And last, but not the least, we have to ensure that the fear of the coronavirus does not sap vitality and vivacity from our social and cultural life, from our markets and malls..
