A Post-Covid World

A Post-Covid World
by Ajay Singha-Raconteur Indica.

As we inch closer to the imminent removal of lock down restrictions, the question on everybody’s mind is: Will it be business as usual?

It is widely believed that “Clues to the future lie in the past”. Social scientists and historians will testify that human nature has not changed much over the past few millennia. Great wars and plagues are known to have reignited economic forces and reinforced the individual’s will to impose human dominance and control over nature. Pacifists and liberals may predict the opposite but the unchanged human nature, with its insatiable and unbridled desires continues to stride ahead. A period of intense economic activity and severe social struggle will ensure that the future will be a difficult, challenging yet most exciting time to live and work in. This paradoxical environment will witness young people across socio-economic segments working and living primarily for the present. We have already entered a period of uncertain geo-political and unpredictable economic realities.

These conditions will most certainly lead to a short term approach towards business decision making and personal planning. The gig economy will grow in the foreseeable future, which implies that in the business world co-operation with new partners and strategic tie-ups even with competitors will become the new normal. Outsourcing contracts, task jobs and freelance work is what the Indian economy thrives on and will see exponential growth. Experience, both from overseas and India leads us to believe that artificial intelligence, big data, and internet of things will make business more resilient to future uncertainties or any “black swan” eventualities.

At an individual level this change will mean that each person must become a life-long learner, who appreciates and understands the key drivers of the industrial revolution 4.0. This would further translate into work from home: companies will hire and engage people who can keep the digital business running, make it more efficient and less prone to breakdowns. Employees will therefore need re-skilling, training with new modules and SOPs that will make working from home more effective. The changed environment will demand new systems and approach creating a vacuum of immense opportunities for new business across borders. Nature abhors vacuum, India and Indians will greatly benefit and prosper if this void is filled in, adopting a positive and dynamic approach.

During the quarantine period there was ample time to introspect and sort out existential issues facing one’s reality. This exercise will lead to reassessment of individual world views, altered lifestyles, new approach to socialising and resultant attitudinal changes amongst people. Indian society will now encounter a fresh set of challenges which emanate from India’s diverse and multi-polar construct. A newfound tolerance for restrictions has become acceptable amongst the relatively evolved and educated segment of society. This phenomenon has not permeated to the less privileged and functionally literate masses. Friction between the compliant and non-compliant segments of society is imminent and likely to spark social, economic and subsequently political disturbances across the continents like the recent protests in USA.  This adds to the prevailing levels of uncertainty, fuels the high risk economic environment and results in short term perspectives for all decision making.

We must never forget that history is witness to periods of stability followed by chaos and mayhem sometimes for such extended periods that they were termed, “the dark ages”. Across the world there is a move away from globalisation and towards nationalism. The widening gap between the rich and the poor, religious extremism, volatile markets, shifting tides of migrants make the world an unstable platform. The world requires social and economic stability at a collective and individual level, poignantly phrased by Aldous Huxley in the Brave New World: “No Social Stability without Individual Stability”. Political leadership will play a key role in ushering this environment. We should therefore expect a period of immense social change, relative political stability and sustainable economic growth.

On the eve of 2020 as the world was bringing in the new-year, a deadly virus had been discovered and within 100 days spread across 184 countries. Human kind was locked in a battle against an unseen enemy who refused to distinguish between nations, religions and social classes. Olympics have been postponed, schools closed and a lasting scar etched on the human psyche. In the past the world experienced several diseases for which no medical cures exist till date. Yet society lives with them by adjusting lifestyles and incorporating effective preventive care. Indians young and old must learn to celebrate the human spirit and trust mankind’s ability to repeatedly surmount impossible odds stacked against the historically suffering humanity.