Title: The World Against Pandemic
Author: Harish Ankadala
Publisher: Notion Press
Genre: Healthy Living and Wellness, Non-Fiction
First Publication: 2020
Language: English
Book Summary: The World Against Pandemic by Harish Ankadala
We have been going through a lot during this pandemic. Many things have changed through the course of just six months, and there is nothing we can do about it other than staying together with our loved ones. But there is one thing we can do: try to understand the situation other people are going through and this pandemic.
So, from what pandemic is to how this pandemic will end, the book has answered a lot of questions, including how it affects our body and how it has affected other countries. There are a lot of theories that China was working on a cure for HIV and COVID-19 is an outcome of one such cure, so, is it true?
There are many such theories that need to be answered. The book has answers to these questions, theories and many others.
Book Review: The World Against Pandemic by Harish Ankadala
Our world has been changing rapidly for decades now, but 2020 may have been a catalyst for an even faster progression of changes in the decade ahead. The worlds of shopping, office work, education, and medicine have been turned upside down, and it remains to be seen what the new normal will look like after Corona fades away. What will our world look like in future, and what did the Covid-19 pandemic do to accelerate that change? This outbreak was one of the biggest in human history until now and the question ‘what the future will bring’ is one of the most interesting aspects this book implements in the mind of the reader.
The World Against Pandemic by Harish Ankadala is a biomedical, microbiological and terrifying trip to tiny super-predators and some thoughts about how they may evolve and be (mis)used. It would be hard to find a more topical book – admittedly it is short – and while I don’t think this will necessarily be the theoretical book of the virus, it does raise a number of issues it is timely to think about. It is well-researched scientific, but without science jargon, study on how COVID-19 started, what warnings were ignored, and how we can do better in the future. Because, unfortunately, there are more pandemics in humanity’s future.
The viruses are more like zombies than enemy soldiers, neither alive nor dead, but in need of us to continue living. They are mindless replicators – not too different, if you think about it, to how our societies have been managing to date – where their getting out of hand and killing the host is an ever-present danger. As so many environmentalists have said of late – when did so many governments suddenly start believing in ‘The science’?
This book, The World Against Pandemic, has been written in a moment of crisis – in the original Greek definition of that word – a moment where a choice must be made. And the options we have available to us hark back to Rosa Luxemburg’s choices between civilisation and barbarism. It seems clear that the free market has proven strikingly incapable of reacting to this crisis – other than to be a further drain on already stretched resources.
We live lifestyles – particularly in our agricultural practices – that make such pandemics inevitable. How likely is it that we will learn from COVID-19? Because ‘learning’ implies change. So, when I read the Queen saying ‘we’ll meet again’ that assumes that the world on the other side of all this will be the same as the one we have so recently left behind. I’m not sure that will be the case, or even if that is what we really want to be the case.
Author Harish’s main point here is that the world we left behind wasn’t working for so many of us. There is hope that we will learn from this time of isolation and demand that we do not go back to the ‘normal’ that existed before – a normal that punished the vast majority to a life of risk and fear. Surely, if this pandemic has taught us anything it is that radical individualism is an absurdity in what is a social species.
Even though this pandemic is still ongoing, Harish Ankadala really nailed the reasons why this pandemic occurred & how it could have been stopped in its tracks. He also gives plenty of solutions for how we can prevent the next one – which the scientific community believes is imminent. It will be an endless chess game between nature and different fractions of human society who try to cure or kill all other people. Author focuses on the run-up to the global shutdown, tracing the origin of the virus, and clearly noting where systems failed, and what we can and must learn from this pandemic. Ultimately, The World Against Pandemic by Harish Ankadala was a very good read & an important one.
