Yesterday, while helping my sister out making chapatis for dinner, I suddenly got a sense of complacency. It was that feeling of becoming an utterly responsible woman who can manage official work and simultaneously help out with household stuff. It was the day when I understood how difficult it is for a responsible woman to manage everything, keeping aside, and not discussing, married working women’s responsibilities (as it is beyond comparison). So it is tough. For a few of you, this might not seem something that difficult to achieve. But for me, it was a milestone. Handling more than one task simultaneously has never been my thing because I always believed in doing one thing at a time and giving my complete best to it. But this B-school experience kept adding feathers of different kinds in my cap. And the first stepping stone for me here was to learn and manage to be multi-functional at the same time. We learn a lot more things during this journey of our beautiful life, but we get very few opportunities to make use of those learnings in real life. I think COVID-19 has given us all that.
“Time,” “Situation,” “Crisis”- these are a few subjective terms which have no definite ending. No one knows about it, and neither anyone can predict it. The only thing we can do is keep ourselves prepared, but again, the level of preparedness is another debatable topic. So, how much should we be prepared? Can we ever be fully equipped in the future after facing what we already had, during the past few months? Well, the answers to these questions are still being researched and studied upon by the best minds around the world. It is the hope that makes us keep going during these critical times- the hope that this eventually will open all those dimensions which were not even though of before, the hope of moving towards a better tomorrow. I know this might sound a little philosophical, but as told by Martin Luther King Jr- “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”
A few days back, I saw on the news a woman naming her newborn as COVID. This hit me hard. I am no one to question a mother’s love for her child, but what worried me more was how could we give such importance to something that doesn’t warrant it, at least in this manner? And I really feel that the misdirected attention we have given to this entire situation has made us scared, weak, and pessimistic about our future.
So, instead of looking at what sectors and economy will get impacted by the effect of COVID-19, looking at what new changes it has brought and appreciating those changes for good should be our way of coping with the effects of this pandemic. The beauty of nature that we all got to enjoy during this lockdown, getting time to spend with your whole family which was only possible during weekends (that also was never sufficient enough as the half of weekend goes by in sleeping our stress off, from the weekday’s hard work we have put in).
Answer this question seriously; have you ever thought of learning and doing what you are learning and doing now ever before? NO, right, or even if you have thought about it, you would not have done it yet because of innumerable reasons- “time,” being the most important one.
The essence of time is something we have never realized until it passes by, and then we complain about it. But now, due to this unasked “situation,” the process has reversed. We have sufficient time to realize its essence and set our targets accordingly, but still, we complain. I will not blame anyone for this, as it is a part of human psychology to complain about everything, and I being the master of that, realize this quite well. But I believe that cherishing this situation at times has made us realized that the entire world stands united against COVID-19. Following social distancing by being at home, quarantining ourselves for 14 days in case of detection, clanging utensils & clapping together for 5 minutes, lighting candles and diyas for 9 minutes, these all are the instances which show that we have proved that we know how to keep ours, and our caretakers’ morale high, even in this time of crisis. There is always some positive that we could take out from the negatives, as even a basic mathematics rule says that two negatives can make a positive, we just need to look for that positive.
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