The new normal

As people are slowly learning to live with Covid, with initial levels of carefulness leading into the usual carelessness, there are scenes that emerge akin to those at disaster struck areas, post the dust settling down. Only difference here being, the locked down public, have decided to roll the dice of fate on their own out of boredom and are gambling with their lives, literally and figuratively. But it has always been a “Sophie’s choice” of life over livelihood. There were voices of GDP getting wiped out, economy in shambles, industrial sectors under irrevocable damage etc during the peak news coverage of pandemic. Now that the death and infection due to the disease, has become a mere statistic, relegated to a single slide of metrics, with mystery death of an up and coming actor taking up primetime coverage, the actual impact to the society, both financially and emotionally is slowly getting unraveled. Lucky for the present government, they don’t have an election to face at least for next couple of years. These are the time that topple the incumbents. People across all strata of society, barring the super-rich, who anyway get richer and richer, have been impacted and suddenly the oxygen of luxury has been sucked out of their system. I saw one debate where in they were discussing the impact of this pandemic in family, between husband and wife. One person was saying that while he could survive on his savings for another month max, he is planning to move to his village and do some other work to sustain his livelihood, if the situation doesn’t change. But the point he mentioned about his servant was what that was hard hitting. Apparently, his servant had asked him for a loan to manage his family. On regular times, neither would’ve been the need for that request nor would’ve been denied. But given the situation where every paise counts, this guy was genuinely sad that he couldn’t meet his servants demand for money, for he had mouths to feed of his own. It is the situation of those on unorganized sectors, who never had any policy cover or retirement cover or any form of guidelines for their salary or livelihood are the worst hit and looks like the worst is yet to come. With companies, slowly and slyly, starting to send more and more people home, under the nose of the very government which proclaimed to protect the job of every salaried person, the spiraling impact is there to be felt for at least another couple of years. If at all the pandemic has tightened anything, it is not just the lungs of the infected, but the purses of everyone. Never has been a divide so obvious in my lifetime at least, till now, where in the haves and have nots have been so severely segregated. This pandemic has pushed all the salary class layers one level down. At the same time, it has also made people realize that, one cannot always survive or depend on being a single skill alone. My dad was a case in study of his own. He knew, typing, shorthand, secretarial work, PF ESI court related work, he can prepare legal suites in the exact language, he can represent his firm at court cases, he was good at verifying legal documents for registration, offset printing, sales and all of this with his PUC education. His lament and probably the single regret that I actually knew about was unable to learn Tally as we didn’t had a computer at our home. And he was quite handy with hardware stuff at home, be it painting our things or fixing some minor plumbing work. I could see the same about most of my school mates parents, where in they were multi skilled in real sense and especially those skills that are required for survival. I am more than sure that generation of folks would’ve seen worse and would’ve struggled lot more yet would’ve been more confident of coming out of it successfully. My generation and possibly the immediate next have been so much pampered and spoiled that even the first sign of trouble scares the wits out of most of us and pushes us into depression. For what it is worth, I can’t fit a light bulb to save my life!!! I’ven’t seen my dad go to any school, online/offline, to learn these skills. I am shameful in admitting that I’ve never realized that he was so much skilled till now and never bothered to understand how he learnt them as well. If I try to make a connect with the Sapiens book, the time of 60’s and 70’s, with their great depression period, famine, natural disasters, all of them would’ve only resulted in making a real men and strong women out of those who tided over them. Agreed, there would’ve been equal or more of those who might’ve failed. But to learn the lesson we need not look beyond our own family. If our parents can put everything in and roll up their sleeves to ensure we had a good future, it should only inspire us to move forward in same direction. As much as people call out for upskilling and reskilling for newer and newer tech, there would be definitely a multi fold need for the so called common skills, for repair work, handy man jobs and many other micro and smaller industries that have been wiped out in this age of point and shoot from app. In every era, life had always been testy. Those who shifted their concentration towards learning newer things, always had an extra ace up their sleeve. The choice is ours.