Collective Force of Good, in Action

We live in the age of AI and disruption, where technology advancements are aplenty and not very far apart either. But they feel almost recursive in some sense. Don’t get me wrong, am sure the iPhone 17 will be “the fastest ever, best ever” iPhone Apple has ever made (pun intended). Am sure the next iteration of OpenAI’s LLM - GPT 4.2 or GPT 5 will break all the benchmarks of the earlier versions. But all these “breakthroughs” feel incremental to the sane, logical man and moreover these are from individual corporate behemoths or deep tech companies on their path to becoming the behemoths. 

When was the last time you recall multiple sectors of society coming together to achieve something phenomenal? The true power of the human race, so to say.

Rich get richer, Poor get poorer

 There is a popular dialogue from the Tamil movie Sivaji, starring Superstar Rajinikanth “Rich get richer, poor get poorer” {Thalaiva! 😎}. Without even drawing on the backdrop of black money that Rajini looks to portray through this dialogue, the line by itself cannot be more true.

Income inequality has been talked about for decades but the COVID-19 pandemic has made the situation much, much worse. White collared workers largely escaped the wrath of the lockdowns and restrictions which hit blue-collar workers manifold. Alas, if you earn your pay at the end of every day and you can’t show up, there is no pay to earn. Income is not unidimensional- it affects access to healthcare and formal education; things considered essential for societal wellbeing. Loss of income has a debilitating impact on lower income households, where there is barely any scope for savings that can be used to push through difficult times.

The Vaccine Conundrum

Just as a new COVID strain ravages Europe, the Indian drug regulator has approved two vaccine candidates for use in differing capacities. One is based on the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, produced by the Serum Institute of India, called Covishield. The second vaccine, Covaxin has been developed by homegrown company Bharat Biotech in association with ICMR (Indian Council of Medical Research).