The HIYP syndrome
Recently I saw a picture of the London Heathrow airport when the commuters had to wait for long hours because of the delay caused by the second corona wave in the UK. There was something really disturbing about that photo. Everybody had their heads down, staring at their phones. I’d like to call it the HIYP syndrome, Head-In-Your-Phone. Not that disturbing, you think? Only if we were to look up and see what we have done to ourselves. This makes me question if we somehow unknowingly got ourselves in this inescapable situation.
The human body has something has a self-healing mechanism. A remarkable feature of our body to heal itself. Our body is known to cure diseases from the common cold to cancer, using this mechanism. Then why do we need medications at all? Well, we overwork our bodies, exploit the mechanism, and the efficiency of the system collapses. And nature is no different than the human body. It is magical to think how everything in nature has its own mechanism, everything goes by the book. There are rules. And I’m sure each one of us has violated all of them at some point in our lives. We’ve done damage to the extent that humans are needed to be shut in their houses for Mumbaikars to be able to see the actual sky and not layers of dust in space. During the whole course of this pandemic, there has been a 500% decrease in sewage, and industrial effluents in rivers, dissolved oxygen levels rose to 79%, so you’ll now be able to see some fishes in the rivers, and the wildlife got a chance to reclaim their land. These statistics are from research on the “indirect impacts of corona” published at sciencedirect.com. The article quotes this line: “Although coronavirus vaccine is not available, coronavirus itself is earth’s vaccine and us humans are the virus”
One of the commuters at the airport recorded the whole scene of people waiting and I’m afraid she’ll post it on her Instagram story with #save_earth #coronasucks, and then go back to Netflix. Maybe if we look up from our phones to see where we’ve come, and what we’ve done to ourselves, we’ll tear up to realize how desperate the earth was for a repair. It is high time we give up the HIYP supremacy to hold our heads up.
