Befriending the monster

Snippets of positivity amidst the crisis

Courtesy: Markus Spiske

Humanity has not witnessed a troublesome time of this magnitude in the recent past, at least for the past few decades to be precise. This is worse than the world wars we fought. People say it’s better to strike off the year 2020 itself from their timeline. Negativity is permeating everywhere, and the world is living in constant fear, confined to a room. My objective is not to augment the omnipresent negativity. Let’s be a devil’s advocate, and try taking a moment to think from a different perspective. Can we churn anything good out of it? Sharing a few thoughts.

It made us reflect on our personal goals

The best way to love our job is to do what we love to do. Those who love music, be a musician, those who like to write, be a writer. It’s a truth, but easy being said. There are only a minuscule number of people out there who are blessed enough to live a life like that. The rest of us, we find safe havens in the white-collar jobs we hate and intentionally push the dreams we had as youngsters to obscurity. Some way or other, we happily become part of the rat race and continue being like that throughout our prime years. But how often do we take a step back, and reflect on whether the way we live our life is the way we wanted it to be? I seldom did it in the past. The lock-down triggered a chain of thoughts in my mind in those lines, and am sure I am not the only one out there.

The air has never been this clean

The Hindu, a leading daily in India reported this morning that the capital city’s air quality has never been this better. Not only that, the pollution levels across the country have come down drastically and the number of cities in the country with good air quality has rose from 6 to 30. India has always been on the spotlight when it comes to air pollution, for we are home to the lion-share of the most polluted cities in the world, the capital city being one among them in the top spot. In the past, we always tried to put the blame on geographical factors for the situation we were in and never attributed it to what we did with our resources. Even though it’s catastrophic to think that the entire mankind needs to come to a standstill for the nature to recuperate and rebalance, the pandemic taught us that it’s doable. We managed to do this in a week’s time, think of what we can achieve if we practised this level of accountability for a longer period, say a few months. Do we still need to debate on whether humanity has contributed to this menace of pollution?

Families have never been this close

One of my colleagues at work once told me apologetically that he talks with his 4-year-old only once a week. It took me a moment or two to digest it during that conversation. He’s someone who commutes for 4 hours a day, starts early in the morning and gets back home late in the night. And his toddler will be on the bed every time he’s home. So is the story of most of the middle-class professionals around this part of the world. The situation now has forced us all to work from home. And an unsolicited benefit of it being the ability to stay with our family for most of the time, every time in fact.

Mankind became humble and modest

We humans always held the bragging rights to be the most intelligent creatures on this planet, and in a way, we have earned our top spot on the food pyramid through the astonishing advancements we have made over the centuries. We were so confident about the state of our medical field that, we thought the great plague or something of that scale can never happen again. And it took only a microscopic virus to remind us that we are still a long way from outsmarting the universe. We now realise, how small we are in this expansive universe.

An alternate timeline for humanity

We were all happily cruising when the pandemic hit us with utmost vigour and there’s no going back to where we were a few months back. The world isn’t going to be the same anymore, the way we think and act will change, the way we work and do business will change, at least for a couple more generations to come. In a way, the universe has created an alternate timeline altogether.

Taught us to distinguish the needs and the wants

We wanted a 7-course dinner when we needed something to feed ourselves. We wanted a 10 bedroom bungalow when we needed a shelter to safeguard our body from heat and cold. Be it the developed countries, or the developing ones, we were always worrisome of one thing or the other. Human greed has been impossible to be satiated ever since the beginning of time. But the COVID situation gave us clarity on the difference between what we want and what we need. It taught us to be appreciative of what we have in hand and not be a complaint box altogether.

Materialism paved way to Spiritualism

We coveted millionaires, we made love like there is no tomorrow, we fought for land and money. It’s an irrefutable fact that most of the humans are drawn towards materialism, no matter what spectrum of the society we are from. We were so busy running behind our material life that we seldom got time to think about the meaning of life. Past few weeks have taught us to be more spiritual, seeking the true meaning of life on this planet.

Triggered a wave of ideas in the minds of start-up evangelists

Thanks to the internet, the business world isn’t on a literal stand-still even during these testing times. We are still running the business, even though with reduced levels of productivity. We have state of the art PC’s & Macs to help us, we have excellent conferencing systems to hold virtual meetings of hundreds of people, that too for free! Yet, we are still a long way from replacing a physical workspace, for nothing in the contemporary tech stack can help us get the sheer feeling of being physically present. And am sure, the aftermath of this crisis would be a maelstrom of ideas in the minds of the budding geniuses, to figure out a way to crack the conundrum.

Being said all these, the current scenario is in no way conducive for a thriving society. There is no denying this fact. However, being positive and utilising this opportunity to reflect is the best thing we can do as a society at the moment, while staying cautious and sane at the same time. We human beings were always resilient as a species. Let’s hope that we will come out of this, much stronger, and as a much better version of ourselves. Let’s fight this crisis with valour and dignity.

Together we thrive!