By — Shyamal Sinha
On 24 March 2020, the Government of India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered a nationwide lockdown for 21 days, limiting movement of the entire 1.3 billion population of India as a preventive measure against the COVID-19 pandemic in India.
Covid-19 pandemic may begin to recede and infected cases shall start to decline and less than 0.01% (0.14 million) of the India’s population is likely to be infected by July 2020.
Even as the world continues to grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic, spiritual leader Dalai Lama has come up with some positive advice to help people across the world deal with isolation. On Thursday, Dalai Lama reached out to people on Twitter and asked them to stand in solidarity with each other to sail through the tough times.
“People face difficulties in many parts of the world, but since all seven billion of us live on this one planet we should be united and stand in solidarity with each other. When this blue planet is viewed from space, there are no national boundaries to be seen,” he tweeted.
This is not the first time that the spiritual leader has taken spoken out to help people in dealing with the stress of the lockdown and isolation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
He also encouraged people to practice compassion towards one another and to “decay” their own “selfish interests” to build a community.
The Tibetan leader said that the virus was bound to change human nature. To deal with the anxiety of adjusting to a changing world, the Dalai Lama advised people to practice meditation in the morning.The closest words for meditation in the classical languages of Buddhism are bhāvanā (“mental development”) and jhāna/dhyāna
he was also spending time in isolation in order to protect himself from the pandemic.
He said that while at usual times he was often giving lectures and holding discussions but in the wake of the pandemic, such activities have been suspended.
While in isolation, the leader said that he had been enjoying nearly two hours of television every day and also devoting time to reading and online meditation to cure lockdown blues.
Meanwhile, the total number of recorded cases of coronavirus crossed 5.69 million with over three lakh people losing their lives to it.
The escalation in numbers might prove to be a big worry as the country reported 7,467 new cases of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) in the last 24 hours in the highest single-day surge, taking the tally to 165,799, according to the Union health ministry.
