Saturday afternoon, listening to the good old Carpenters while sitting on the terrace of my Bandra flat, Mumbai, I take a moment to reflect on the day from exactly five years back.
On March 22, 2020, we announced work from home (WFH) at the company I was working for at the time, as a precaution due the surging COVID-19 pandemic. We shut down all our manufacturing plants, R&D facilities, parts centre and all the offices in India and other locations in different parts of the world. Two days later, India went into a country-wide lockdown.
That was a time of unprecedented challenges, a period of uncertainty that humanity had never seen for almost a century, probably since the second World War!
WFH meant work invaded our private space and the families had to quickly learn to adjust to that. For many of us, Zoom meetings would start very early in the morning and continue through the day. Cooking times in the family had to be adjusted according to the schedule of our work-meetings, and yet sometimes the piercing sound of the pressure-cooker—an ubiquitous item in Indian kitchens—letting off steam would break the monotony of those seemingly never-ending zoom calls.
Some of us learned to space out our day with short breaks. For me, these breaks meant catching the Australian series ‘Outback Truckers’ on Netflix for 20 minutes before getting back to work. On some days, however, work would not get over before very late in the evening.
In the morning, I would sit on the balcony of my Gurgaon (Gurugram, northern India) home that looks out towards the Golf Course Extension Road. Otherwise one of the busiest thoroughfares in the Millennium City on any normal day, the road would be totally desolate, except for a few stray dogs and cattle. Just one week into the lockdown, the sky outside looked more blue, and one could see as far as the Aravalli hills in the far distance from my balcony.
The best part? Being able to have lunch with family on all days, instead of just weekends. And with nowhere to go, we would sometimes huddle together in the evening over a drink and just talk with each other.
With no certainty over tomorrow, we learned to value each other’s company and reminisced about the past—the journey that we have traversed together, as the unspoken worry lingered over us—is it this far, and no further?
We learned to accept the perceived shortcomings of our loved ones and just celebrate each other’s presence in our lives. We called up friends from school who we had not spoken to for ages; we set up zoom calls with friends and extended family of cousins that we had not met for years!
In the absence of any domestic help, routine household chores such as laundry, cooking and doing the dishes felt like tasks of unimaginable proportions. Soon, these tasks ceased to be gender roles, and became life skills for all of us.
However, the pandemic soon started snatching away loved ones! Every day brought heart-rending news of bereavement from family and friends.
And then one day, it hit closer home. A gentle soul—more of family than a friend—succumbed to the pandemic. I had spoken to him just four days before he breathed his last. While he informed me through a message about his hospitalisation, I never had an inkling that the illness would take him away, as he was able to chat over WhatsApp! I have never since been able to muster up the courage to open our conversation; his last message to me read—“Tu toh bhai hai mera” (You are my brother).
During the pandemic, hundreds of thousands of lives were lost across the world, and millions of lives were saved too.
Thanks to the proactive government interventions, corporates as well as non-profits, and above all, the doctors, health workers and volunteers who put their own lives at immense risk to come forward to help that we are alive today.
How time flies….five years have gone by in a jiffy!!
As we all carry on with our lives, it is important that we pause for a moment to remember and express our deep sense of gratitude to all those who came forward to help us with compassion and kindness in those difficult and uncertain times.
Bharatendu Kabi is a former journalist and Mumbai-based Communication Specialist
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