Pandemics can teach.

Pandemics can teach.

One of the positive consequences of the pandemic is an increased human approach of one human to another. As you have hunkered down in your homes, you have become far more empathetic to each other’s challenges and stresses. Even as you maintain an arm’s distance from one another, you seek more into the welfare of others than before. You now genuinely understand that there is more in life, than money, status or power. Largely because when the pandemic hit , it hit without discrimination. It killed equally. With no curatives in sight, regardless what you were capable of spending you still had nothing to spend your money on.

Today you have suddenly learned to care for elderly parents. Work that the wife did, cooking and cleaning have become interesting to you and your work life has tuned itself to be stress free. It is no more about the coveted the corner office and those you have to beat to be there. It is about doing your work and getting suitably paid for it. It’s suddenly become more acceptable to show your feelings and hoping to be understood. Indeed, demonstrating vulnerability is increasingly seen as an okay thing, not as weakness. You now say hi to your neighbour over the fence, something you never did before. You listen to the stories of misery that the maid has to say and at least try to picture conditions of misery and poverty. And most importantly, you now hear and enjoy the tales that your little one’s mind conjured up.

As you move into a more hybrid working environment, it is paramount that you continue to strive for a workplace without discrimination. Bullying, harassment and discrimination in the workplace have themselves been long-standing plagues within the workplace, across the labour market. For years, some parts of the workforce have been engaged under the leadership of those who favour bullies, collude and discriminate against those that simply want to exercise their basic, and legal, right of equal opportunity. The situation and priorities have been drastically altered. Investing in appropriate technologies rather than custom designed offices has gained acceptance, what with the idea of working from home gaining a large following. After all what does it matter where you work from, as along as the work gets done in time and with the required quality? You meet regularly on the net during our Skype or Zoom conferences and exchange ideas without the stiffness of your ties choking you.

Socially, you meet one another infrequently. But even your second cousin has constant interactions with you, unlike the earlier days when you reintroduced yourselves at the marriage functions or at a funeral of a common relative. You see the man who dwells on the street not as a social nuisance anymore but as someone who didn’t get the fortune of a sheltered life. You even feel the slight envy of the immunity that his harsh life had installed within him, something you can only dream of.

Today’s circumstances have levelled the playing ground for all. Those who had not, now have a chance to start afresh. The positions of power have been scaled down and in many cases changed to a more common level and workplace discriminations pushed backwards.

There are lessons aplenty that the disturbances created by the COVID19 interlude has for us and hopefully, it will make lasting changes in every life in the near future.