What’s ‘Normal’ After The Pandemic?

By Supriyo Chaudhuri, Trustee – Bridge India

 
The new year 2022 will be like no other. The shock of 2020 and the grappling of hope-and-despair of 2021 will be behind us. The pandemic, which seemed to threaten civilisation earlier, will become a mere logistics problem.
At the year-end party, we would celebrate modern science, for putting the shape-shifting killer genie back into the bottle. As the seconds are counted down, we would shed our fears and look the future in its eye.
At that hooray moment, we will know that there will be no going back to 2019. Our lives, societies and businesses, may have just been reinvented in the shadow of the pandemic. The memory of the 'pandemic years' will linger on: Therefore, in all our hope, there will be sobriety; our feting of the new heroes will embrace the mourning for the dead; in our new exuberance, there will be the anticipation of payback time.
More than the outward changes, the changing ideas will matter more. The principles that we h...