As 2020 draws to a close, for some strange reason the thought of my blog came to my head once again after a gap of a few years. However, when I sat down to write, this catchphrase from Terminator is all I could think of for the year gone by.
Yes, unlike most people, I have had little impact from this pandemic. On the contrary, I have had the opportunity to spend more time with family than would have been possible, so in a way I am grateful for this opportunity. However, the impact this pandemic has had on the entire globe is difficult to gauge. In fact, some changes might be so long lasting that it may influence our lives way after the pandemic is over and life moves back to normal, whatever that would mean.
There are sections of our society whose resilience has truly been tested over the past 9 months. From labourers walking a thousand kilometers to reach home, to the many who lost their jobs and are still struggling to find the next one, to the many students who have been left behind because they were not or could not be part of the digital education wave. Unfortunately, while the pandemic was force majeure in many ways, there have been many other incidents which make one feel as if the world is coming to an end.
As pleasing as it is to witness resilience from your fellow humans, it is also surprising to see most of us standing by when our fellow humans go through suffering which we can barely imagine. While there was the odd Sonu Sood and perhaps a few others who went out of their way to help others, the vast majority of us stood like innocent bystanders, more content in providing support to everyone on LinkedIn and Twitter, while doing hardly anything for even those who were in our vicinity - Our house help, security guards, cab driver and the like.
Another thing which 2020 has done is made me realise how limited and small human life is and how little we really do in it. Most of our time is spent looking at achieving the deliverables for the day, maybe the week or month. As we age, our targets become more vague and more stretched out going from months to quarters or an year, but we hardly move forward. We just replace one target with a new one at the end of every few months. It is perhaps time to figure out what life's objective is, what is it that we are moving towards with every passing day, where would life be in another 15 years time?
In a few years, 2020 will perhaps seem more memorable than it looks today. We might even look back and miss the time when air became clean and the water became pure. However, hopefully, the memory will remain strong enough to understand the frailty of human life, and the fact that life is a gift which should be treated as such with something more than just a quarterly target.
As for 2020, I'll quote Leonardo from Blood Diamond "When was the last time the world wasn't falling apart". 2020 has come and gone in the blink of an eye. Here's to even tougher challenges awaiting us over the next few decades...
