Coco is a 2017 Pixar animation film about a boy who accidentally enters the world of the dead. An interesting premise, right? The movie is his race to get back to the living world by dawn, so that he doesn’t remain there permanently or in other words – DIE. In this movie, there is a very profound scene where the boy witnesses a dead man die. The confused boy asks his companion, Hector what just happened and Hector responds saying that when a person is forgotten, that’s when the ‘Real death’ happens. These forgotten souls don’t have a place, even in the land of the dead. That made a lot of sense. Once no one knows you ever existed, you never existed (at least philosophically).

This got me thinking. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that there is a land of dead and there are lots of souls there living just like we do in the living world. They exist as long as someone remembers them. Because being remembered is the most important thing in that world, lets assume the power and stature in that world is directly proportional to the the number of people who remember you. But there is a catch here, this isn’t a fair logic. I am pretty sure that Chengiz khan and Hitler will stay longer in the memory of the World when compared to Nelson Mandela or MK Gandhi. I say this because, our brains are hard wired to remember threats. Its a means of survival. So, its not fair that bad guys get better stature in this world, so lets assume good memories are a credit and bad ones are a debit. That evens it out to a pretty fair world. Its a fictional one, so it can be fair.

I haven’t invented this concept, it’s the same concept of a good vs bad ledger that most religions of the world preach. The more good credit you accumulate, the better is your after life or next life. I guess, our ancestors believed that this was the only way to keep the us in check.

One thing common between Chengiz khan, Hitler, Mandela and Gandhi? There are all historical figures. These are the guys who fill the pages of history text books of children across the world. No one else would be remembered for more than 4 generations. My history text books mentioned a lot of important events that occurred in the past. So good, mostly bad. If my memory serves me correctly, we are living in the first ever event that effected the entire world since the Triassic–Jurassic extinction event. That’s 65 million years ago. I am not counting the last ice age which ended about 11,700 years ago because it did not effect the southern hemisphere.

The corona-virus pandemic has hit the world hard. It was in a way Nature putting us in our place, but most of us don’t seem seem to realize this. We are so very eager to get back to out ‘Normal’ or sometimes simply stupid that we are continuously throwing caution to wind and add fuel to the fire of this epidemic. It has reached every nook and corner of the earth. From the tribes in the Andaman to the indigenous people of the Amazon, no one is being spared. This is what it must have felt for people in eastern Europe when the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded. The country that was responsible for alerting the world did every thing possible to cover up until there was no where to hide and by the time the world know what was going on, it was too late. Covid-19 makes the incident Chernobyl look like a fire in a dumpster

I know I haven’t done anything worthwhile in my life to be inducted in to the history books hall of fame or ‘infame’. But I do believe our entire generation will be held responsible for what we are doing now and will have a special place in the history, may be even a separate chapter for us. The worst part is that we don’t know if and when this will end. If it does end, how far is the next Zoo-tonic virus pandemic? According the National Geographic, 16% of all humans can be attributed to Zoo-tonic diseases and they also make up 75% of the emerging infectious diseases. AIDS, Mad cow, SARS, Ebola, MERS, Swine flu and now a new strain of SARS. If we continue going against the laws of nature and keep exploiting it in every possible way, the next deadly disease will be right around the corner waiting to pounce on us.

There is still time, Our actions over the period of coming months will determine how our future generations will remember us or if there will be a future. History is always written by the victors, at this moment of time I am not sure if there will be any.