COVID Blues

World has experienced a series of effects of COVID pandemic right from the year 2020. We are into the third year, but the virus is going strong with its metamorphosis through Mutations. We have seen three major waves, many a variants, death and chaos in different parts of the world. Yes, it has been quite a leveler - affecting all human races, visiting all the countries - rich or poor, taking a toll on economy thereby governance, destroying livelihood of many daily wage workers, affecting work as well as education. It has also taught us to live within our means, eat healthy and be compassionate to the world at large. The worst affected are the young adults whose formal education has suffferred beyond limits. They have missed the fun of living and learning together. Small mischiefs and greater celebrations of campus life. Hope they will get their share of fun and frolic once sun shine emerges again. We have almost ran out of greek alphabets to name the variants of COVID. Some are Variants of Concern as designated by appropriate authorities. Present reign of 'Omicron' has been described by many as signal to end of COVID era. Fervently hope that these turn out to be true. Whatever be the outcome, world has learned to live with constraints. Many functions have gone online underlining the need for a robust network backbone - available for all without restrictions. From entertainment to education and work, affordable network connectivity is of paramount importance these days. I am sure world governments have taken notice and is working to ensure the same for its citizens. In fact governance is also delivered through the same network these days. May we pour collective wisdom of mankind into developing as well as deploying faster networks. Care should be taken to ensure availability of the same to the poorest of its citizens through appropriate mechanisms. The security of data should be protected when all the information is available on the network. Present scheme of encryption may no where be sufficient once quantum computers are deployed from their present research epoch. May be like COVID, mankind may have to live with exposure to private data. The targeted marketing calls or advertising one receives is a clear indication of systems knowing ones preference or search history. World will keep on evolving. Its quite good to know that human race will continue to adapt so that we can carry on. Future generations may not have "JOB" as seen in traditional sense. But then ours is quite different from those a century ago. Data, Infrastructure and security systems will be the thrust areas. Research into high end computing and fundamental sciences are going to be in the lime light as far as i can see. All the best to one and all

Life & Education Braves Pandemic

Continuing the thread from my last blog wondering how world will change during the pandemic times. Well, We all adapted to the situation. That quality is the one which allows continuation of life forms through evolution. There might not have been evolution in physiological or anatomical features of humans during the Covid - 19 pandemic but we have managed to discover to circumvent inconveniences caused by pandemic. Education is one sector which saw brilliant innovations. Teachers and students together made progress to engage one another and keep engaged. In fact students managed to beat teachers in use technology to one's advantage. Though a lot of aspects of education especially the social & physical ones got a back seat, show DID continue.... Many sectors especially tourism & transport got very badly affected. Companies lost much income while coughing up committed expenditure. Some of them even had to close their shutters. Certain sectors such as communication services amazed us in scaling up despite harsh environments. Online meeting platforms & social media thrived on the additional time men and women have in hand. Governments around the world are still having a tough time in managing the spread, gathering resources to keep peoples needs met & saving the economy from collapsing. Its an irony that stock markets are soaring, possibily due to inherent leaning of humen towards gambling. Moreover opportunites for sensible investments are dwindling. World lost around 50 lakh human lives & the clock is still ticking. Long term effects of COVID - 19 are yet to be ascertained. Some of the countries has started third booster dose where as majority of nations are struggling to complete administering first dose of vaccine. It is to the credit of software prowness of India that CoWin application served as rugged platform for vaccine administration and management. Aadhaar card rolled out earlier has been put to rigorous use to pave way for applications such as CoWin. I too got transferred in the midst of pandemic from Kerala to Telangana. Got vaccinated fully with a gap of 84 days in between the jabs. Going by the reported trend world over, we are nearing the end of pandemic. May life be back to normal as it used to be in the past. Loka samastha Sukhino Bhavanthu