Sapiens Deux

 As with the first book, this one also is being read in bits and pieces and i am relishing every single chapter of it. One alarming thing that i noticed was, when i started reading this book, Covid was raising its head and soon hit a peak that was not even imagined by anyone. The previous book had talked about great diseases like plague and global level catastrophes in the form of war and famine. It was almost as if the virus was thumbing its nose at us and our present way of living. The more i started reading the second book, the more it made me realize, how true the concepts mentioned in the book were as compared to real life!!! It is a morbid comparison, but if one could compare the number of lives lost due to malaria, typhoid, water borne diseases, malnutrition as against the present pandemic, it definitely makes one wonder, why they were never dealt with such seriousness? Even now, the media covers Americas, Asia, Europe and the Australian continents. There is one major area which is supposedly the birth place of humanity that is devoid of any mention. Probably what the world needs is an African superpower, economically and otherwise, for the continent to get a mention!! Wonder what those people who are from places that no one mentions or care about, unless they have oil running under them or for some rare earth minerals of course, should do to get their cases considered. As much as this pandemic is a global threat, wonder what it would take for every major life killer - livelihood killer, to be considered as a threat to humanity!!? We run a serious risk of becoming those dystopian societies described on futuristic movies, where in the super rich and super powerful fly around on their space crafts, while certain regions are restricted to being jail houses for savages and convicts. Quite sure in couple of decades time, there would surely be some miracle drug which would reverse ageing and would increase the average age of humans to beyond what Bradman could finish his career with. Will such a drug cover a cure of the more common diseases that make mere survival a challenge for the majority of the world or will it remain an elixir from utopia, resulting in proving those B-grade Hollywood flicks as real - only time will tell.