The Perfect Jinx

Started reading (once again), Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus. And on the second page came across this passage.

One line stood out “…. in the last few decades we have managed to rein in famine, plague and war”.

This book was written in 2015. The existing diseases were being managed; the new ones (SARS, Ebola etc.) were being controlled before they acquired pandemic proportions. The world’s political boundaries had been more or less stable for years except for few localized hotspots. Meanwhile, technological innovations were ensuring that global hunger was reducing despite an increasing population. In fact, obesity was becoming a bigger issue than hunger. And the efficient global supply chains ensured that men and material could be moved fast to the place of need in the event of any natural disaster.

Fast Forward to 2022. We have the “plague” - It’s been two and a half years since Covid 19 pandemic struck and upended the world as we knew it. We have “war” - the Russian invasion of Ukraine gave the western world its biggest war since 1945 with the added threat of nuclear weapons. And we are also staring at a global famine – the pandemic and the war disrupted the global supply chains, which combined with climate change has created the beginning of a global food shortage.

All of a sudden, the future is not looking so rosy for the homo sapiens!

As any sports fan can relate, this line is the perfect epitome of the “commentator’s curse” or simply “the jinx”.

Yet, jokes aside, the human beings have become more and more resilient and have better control over such matters. Fast-tracked global development of vaccines certainly helped in curbing the covid19 pandemic (although a lot of damage has already been done, but things could have been much worse). The Russia-Ukraine stand-off has not spiraled beyond the region (yet!). And steps are being taken to manage the food crisis. So overall, while not a rosy picture, history is replete with examples of things having gone much, much worse. 

So, in essence, Harari is right, we as a species, certainly have matters in our own control. How we handle it is also a decision totally in our hands and we have only ourselves to blame if do not evolve for the better!