Samvat 2076 draws to an end. The new year begins for many Indian communities and 2020 -a year of chaos and turbulence is almost gone. Covid is not gone but the first steps to a post Covid economy knocks on our doors. Looking back on these times, will there be some who will draw a line and say – here is the dawn of a new era ?
“Buy Land – they don’t make anymore of it”
Mark Twain’s sage advice from over a century ago is finally past its expiry date. Work from home, zoom calls and google meet and the online class rooms have forced us to reconsider travel, schools, offices and physical contact. Would there be more schools if one does not need a huge building ? Can the same schools handle more numbers with attendance required only for labs and PT ? Work from home looks like its here to stay and the reduction in costs is something financial controllers will not easily give up. Covid has shattered the myth of urban agglomeration. Decentralised communities connected by hi speed broadband seem the way cities will evolve. Will a city of ten million inhabitants seem an exaggeration ? Reading accounts of traffic jams caused by elephants in Chandni Chowk in the mid eighteenth century though, reassures that somethings will probably never change.
The Gig economy
A thousand years ago, women worked the farms with men. In the long cold winters, they sheared and spun and wove so much so the word Distaff which means a spindle also means a woman. Singing and story telling were not options which looked nice on your CV – It what kept you sane during monsoons in india or the long cold winters of the central asia and Europe as the world stopped to catch its breath and isolated itself. Having more than one skill was not “talent” – it was the norm and an essential survival toolkit. Then came James watt and the steam engine and the philosophies of time and motion studies until Henry Ford perfected the assembly line and we all knew how to punch a ticket or a key board but little else. Now old lessons on self sufficiency are being dusted off and a new generation is learning to cook, sew and clean for itself. Getting a haircut from dad or mom was fraught with terrors only for the first three months. As unemployment rages through nations, walking back home to grow your own food had become the only way to survival for millions and many of those folks don’t seem to be in a hurry to return. Having three or four strings to your bow has go to be seen as the new priority for people young or old.
Strength of the Community : what do you do if you are quarantined. India and large swathes of the world have lived off the charity of neighbours and friends to source supplies and medicine. Where social bonds are strong, communities have recovered. Where there has been low investment in public health, and social consensus, strife seems to rule. Some have sought to play this as competition of ideologies – the organised statist dictatorships of countries like China and the middle east versus the chaotic democracies of the West and South and South East Asia. Literacy and compassion is probably the prism through which this question will be answered. As we look to the future its time to bid adieu to a way of life which is unlikely to survive the coming times. A century of expansion and consumption, a sense that mankind would eternally be at the centre of things is now giving way to a more austere time. For many , the dream of a life which is better than that of their parents, would remain just that – a dream. Will we be able to survive the social tensions from embedded inequalities and a sense of living in a harsh and bitter land ? a historian may well mark this year and Gibbon like say, this is the beginning of the Decline.
Perhaps a kinder fate awaits and we can look back to count the ways we changed recalling Ulysses – “…one equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will… ours to seek, to find, to strive and not to yield”