Trigger Warning: Mental health first. If you are feeling slightest of mental health related turbulence due to extended lockdown such as: anxiety, phobia, anger, melancholy or OCD, please do not proceed further. It is likely that it will aggravate your emotions and prove to be counter-productive. You can always come back to the article later. For those who choose to proceed further, please keep in mind, I do not have a crystal ball and like any other medium, I use the written word to communicate my concerns and opinions.
It has been more than three months now since the COVID-19 virus took over the entire world and especially India. Much has been said, written and discussed how the time we are living in is an unprecedented one. Unprecedented, because the virus caught us off-guard when we thought we were at the peak of our civilization.
To understand the condition in which we are right now, one should watch the first episode of the British television drama series Black Mirror. In this episode, the fictional Prime Minister Michael Callow faces a huge and shocking dilemma when Princess Susannah, a much-loved member of the Royal Family, is kidnapped. As a ransom, the kidnapper has asked him to do something so horrifying that he vows not to fulfil this ransom.
Upon hearing about the ransom, taken aback, PM Callow asks his advisors:
“So what now? What’s the playbook?”
“This is virgin territory, Prime Minister. There’s no playbook.”
Each of us including our state-heads, scientists and economists are Black Mirror’s Prime Minister Michael Callow. There is no playbook. Like him, we have no idea as to what to do with this, how to deal with it. We lack any experience of dealing with something like this on such a grand scale: the virus, the entire social-economic fabric, international economy, basically everything under the Sun. We cannot solve a quantum computational problem with knowledge of school-level mathematics. Reading so far sounds so much full of pessimism. In a way, yes. But, when my loved one will be lying alone on a deathbed in the hospital, I will know that the reality has knocked on my door.
What most of the countries have tried to do is: flatten the curve. We have seen enough of such graphs by now where it is hard to judge fact from fiction. What most of the people overlook is the meaning of the phrase-‘flatten the curve’. In its purest form, it means to inhibit the number of new infections (and that’s why deaths) due to COVID-19 at any given time so that the healthcare facility can better prepare themselves for the incoming volume of the patients. Taking one day at a time. So, we are trying to buy time, a simple bargain. Whether India has flattened the curve or not is of little interest to me because that requires a separate dedicated article on it. My interest lies in communicating and reiterating the naked truth: the truth that we are part of collateral damage. Yes, collateral damage in the war against COVID-19. As the government machinery is preparing to ease the restrictions in most parts of India, we need to make a decision. A decision whether we want to be collateral damage or not.
It is a no-brainer that an immediate recession is bound to cast a shadow on the world economy. We knew it three months back, the world knew it. Our last three months of economic struggle will reflect in our upcoming quarter. Nothing that we do now immediately will change the results. The nations have struggled grappling with reality until now. What follows now is more important.
There are several military strategies during the war. The last few months had been ‘smokescreen’ by the virus and its lateral damages that we did not expect. The guerilla offensive of the virus surprised us, and we spent time figuring out our ground. As now we are gradually walking out of the smokescreen, the enemy cannot hide. A good defence strategy needs to be applied. Instead of going in defence, all the leaders out there are claiming: ‘we will fight it, we will restart our routine, we will win.’ It is emplty rhetoric. Whoever joins them, will become one of the collateral damages for the same leaders and six months down the line, they will proclaim: ‘the sacrifice of our countrymen would not go in vain, we will keep fighting.’
Each individual needs to take a step back, regain ground and have a long view of life in light of the upcoming ease of lockdown. As we know the businesses that are purely dependent on physical interaction with clients, they have few to no alternatives but to restart with all the social distancing discipline. On the other hand, there are businesses/organizations which can make do without the physical presence of people. They have learnt that work from home is doable and can continue for some more time. If they haven’t figured out how to get work done from home, COVID-19 is undoubtedly not to blame.
Today, more and more organizations are citing the government’s ease of lockdown nod as a reason to resume offices (interestingly, these are the same organizations which refused to follow the lockdown order in the starting). It is all convenient. Human lives are just numbers, a part of the curve and mean nothing. The establishment seeks an answer to only one question: what is in there for us?
I hear many stories from my friends. Their organizations lost the golden opportunity of adapting during the past few months. They are trying to re-implement the old ways of work by reopening their premises for their people with now well-known gimmick of 1/3rd staff and its all variants. These are half-measures, dreadful laughter. The interesting point is that nobody questions the effectiveness of such pseudo-measures and their practices. If you are an average working individual, you’re commuting through an average density of 382 people per square km. If you’re wearing an N95 mask (which is meant for indoor usage) and riding your two-wheeler at 40 hours/km speed along with other traffic, it does not need the genius to realize how much high the risk of contracting the infection is. The point is, all government entities are clueless; their immediate concern is only the economy. In their race to save the economy (which is anyways a lost cause), they are willing to make sacrifices.
The painful reality that the organizations that could work remotely for two months, are desperately waiting for their physical workspace to be filled with by people. I know people whose work is mostly doable from home which they didn’t figure out in pre-corona era. They are pouring slightly more work than they used to in physical space. There seem little logic and reasoning behind the desperation. Perhaps, it is likely that such businesses/organizations have failed to adapt. They seem to have indulged in non-stop firefighting during the break time instead of innovating strategies, course-correcting monitoring and redefining productivity. If one has missed the train, it is not late yet. The rules of all industries have changed; the old times are never going to return. Anyone trying to bring back the old culture will be like a hamster running in the wheel.
Some first-movers have signalled what the future is going to be like: Twitter, Square, TCS and many other small to medium size companies have embraced the change. ‘Tech-companies can afford to do that’ is the typical response I receive during my interactions. This response stops the mind, the path of least resistance. The question should be ‘how can we do something similar?’. It opens up a whole new lot of opportunities. The message is clear: empathize, innovate, adapt or perish.
The ease of lockdown and subsequent restart of the new normal in physical space seems inevitable for most of the people; hence it is a good idea to look at some of the most important questions to answer before you, or your loved one decides to step out of your home. Please note, the answers to these questions are pointing towards something more significant than the answers themselves. (If you’re holding that red, green, orange, yellow zone dataset in your hand to argue that you live in a safe zone, please refer to someone who is already lying in the hospital. You will know how the data gets manipulated at the source.)
- How are you going to travel to your work location?
- How far is your work location?
- What are the safety precautions followed by you?
- Will those safety precautions safeguard you when an airflow at the speed of 40 km/hr hit your body?
- Will your workspace be daily sanitized? In a real sense?
- With who would you come in contact? How would they be commuting to and fro the work location?
- Would your co-workers be following the safety precautions as religiously as you do?
- What is it that necessitates your physical presence? What difference did your physical absence make in the last two months? And are you still working there?
I hope you got the real answer. This is the second Chernobyl moment for the world.
All of this boils down to only one thing: personal choice. We have bills and rent to pay, family to feed, have a career to take care. We have a zillion things in our plans. But, have we relooked at our priorities? Have we taken some time off to ask what matters to us: a paycheck or our and our loved one’s lives and the fulfilment? How much does one need to live?
Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.
Politely exercising your right to live is still an option. We need to bargain; we need to learn to negotiate but it is a better choice than being slaughtered at the hands of the unknown.
While the organizations/businesses/governments around the world can’t contain their desperate excitement to go back to the routine with so-called social distancing norms, it is your personal choice that will directly profess your fate.
Please choose wisely. The toughest of time has passed, with enough support from the community and loved ones, we will navigate through the rest of the time too. Humanity has never seen such compassion in a long time.