How are you?

May 06, 2021

In the strange times we are in, it seems overwhelming to chase targets and meet deadlines. If things are going Business as Usual for you, you are very lucky.

I was talking to a friend about me writing a post on a startup when he mentioned he was talking to the director of this startup for investing in his own. He got to know a few days back that the director succumbed to Covid.

Then there’s this volunteer group whose members are working hard day and night to get leads, help patients get the medical support they need.

Every morning I wake up, I see hundreds of messages on this group. There are cases where a volunteer is actively looking for leads only to receive a message a few hours later that the patient is no more.

The kind of mental stress the caregivers, volunteers,medical health professionals, all recognised and unrecognised front line workers are undergoing can only be described, if one attempts to, in a dystopian fiction novel.

While on one side, there’s this news of a health emergency slowly, silently engulfing the entire nation, there’s this other side for the businesses that see oppportunity in growing during this same time. If things are going “Business as usual” for you, you probably are doing better than the most of the entire population.

Someone has to keep the kids enterntained at home, so sales of toys should increase. Someone has to focus on self-care and beauty so cosmetic product sales should increase. Someone has to have that Biryani on a Friday night so food delivery should go on.

I get it, we all need a little comfort in the times we are in which we try to get from the things listed above and many more. But should we also try to look at this from the angle of at what cost are we getting the privileged comfort to ourselves? Hundreds of warehouse workers, delivery persons risking their own life to be a messenger of “at home care and comfort”.

In a very heartwarming post by the Tata group for Tata Cliq, they insisted the customers to maybe shop less to reduce the load employees/ workers have on them to ship the deliveries on time. Myntra followed it and published a similar post yesterday ( or today). Swiggy made its work week 4 days a week. Borosil annoounced pay for 2 years if in an unfortunate case, an employee succumbs to covid related death.

An elderly man gave his bed to a young person, saying that “he had lived his life”. A bidi maker donated his life’s savings for a corona fund raiser, stating that he makes 1000 bucks a day which are enough to sustain his life for years to come. Two women police officers gave comfort to a child who was found sitting next to his dead mother for 2 days.

In times of crisis, history has always seen acts of kindness as well as hatred in their extremes. Bertrand Russell in one of his interviews says, “I do not want to change my hope for the world”. It is this hope that makes us irrational but optimistic.

This world however has family, friends, colleagues, strangers who do not receive the same kind of empathy from us. I hope people are reaching out to their friends and families in any way they can. There’s something that I tried to change in my communication with internal stakeholders who I know only from their alias.