*Pandemic Diary's Human Narrative

 *Pandemic Diary's Human Narrative*

       - Suresh Kattilangadi

                  There is a sentence by Charles Darwin in the book On the Origin of Species about the existence of species in the universe. Survival of the Fittest. In the competition for existence that takes place throughout the world of life, the natural determination that suitable traits will be preserved and those that are not will die out is a universal law at all times. A struggle for survival occurs when more members of each lineage are born than can survive. In the complex and changing conditions of life, organisms with at least some adaptive traits are more likely to survive. It can be said that they are selected by nature. According to Darwin, according to the strong principle of heredity, the selected species transmits its new and changed form to the next generation. In short, it is the struggle for existence that has always pushed the living species including humans forward and pushed them back. Then there are three types of living beings in the universe. Those who continue to struggle for survival, those who survive, those who fail..

  This struggle has been going on in the universe for ages. Natural disasters or climate change, plague, malaria, cholera, power struggle, war, hunger and unemployment are the only differences. The last link is the first wave, the second wave and the third wave of the Covid Pandemic which is flowing through the living universe. And Covid will not be the last of the many junctures in human history. We are still fighting against covid. The birth of the novel Pandemic Diary is in this battle where the chronology itself can be divided into before Covid, with Covid and after Covid. To be precise, the period of this novel is the period of total shutdown that started with the first experimental lockdown and then lasted for two and three weeks.

          The Plague is a novel by Albert Camus published in 1947. Albert Camus tells the story of a plague that is spreading in the French Algerian city of Oran. There must be as many epidemics as there are wars in the world. Yet wars and pestilences always find us ill-equipped for anything, writes Camus. No pestilence can be limited to human calculations. So one might say that this is not reality, this is a nightmare and it will end soon. But it doesn't always end that way, from one nightmare to another, humans end up. Especially humanists. Because they have not prepared themselves, Camus underlines in the novel. In the beginning neighbors would often open their windows and see what was going on outside. Then they quickly close the windows. Then there is the cramping, the crying, the pains. Many years ago, Camus painted what have become everyday discourse words among us such as lock down, quarantine and so on, that madness continued in these houses heated by fever and anxiety. All those words got meaning later with the arrival of covid.

      Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera is a portrait of another epidemic. At the beginning of the 20th century, the cholera epidemic took the lives of more than two hundred thousand people in the Caribbean, and the brilliant work of love in the time of cholera was born.

                            It is because the novel Pandemic Diary, which presents the human struggle of the Covid era in its face, wave and heat, cannot be presented without mentioning these two novels. Perhaps no other novel that has been presented in such a comprehensive manner during the Covid era has been published in any language in the world so far, which gives us a reason to be proud that Pandemic Diary was born in Malayalam. Shivprasad Pallot's Pandemic Diary is equally concerned with the plague and the romance of the time of cholera, not only in documenting the epidemic but also in subtly uniting with the marginalized through artistic setting and narrative.

      When reading the novel Pandemic Diary, the reader experiences a tripartite view of those who continue to struggle for existence, those who survive and those who fail, it becomes a mark of the era. If works of art are meant to mark the era, this novel Pandemic Diary is a human narrative. When yesterdays become part of history, the burning scenes of the Covid Lockdown are expressed in green. Pandemic Diary is a historical narrative.