Might as well be the hardest thing to consider right now, that there could be a brighter side to the maddening chaos around us at the moment. What started as a three-week break from normalcy has escalated to become the way of life. A life we couldn’t have fathomed a year and a half ago, where groceries are sold on strict timings, coffee tables have become office props, dining rooms have become classrooms for your children and computer screens have become classrooms.
Our entire life that was once scattered around the cities has now shrunk within the distance between our rooms. How can there possibly be a brighter side to this?

Our children, who are supposed to be sprinting or cycling at their best speeds and scrape their knees and come home crying a little, are sitting indoors staring into screens going from education to entertainment.

But however hopeless the circumstances look, there is always a bright side to everything. So we shall push ourselves into our optimistic pants and list out the factors that we can be grateful for after the Covid-19 pandemic.

RELATIONSHIPS AND OUTLOOKS-

• There is no doubt or question about the fact that we were all running in maddening circles of ambitions, productivity, and results. Our desires kept compounding and we went further and further into the circle. Anyone young enough to know that they would be alive for the next 50 years, had their next 50 years planned to the last detail, and why wouldn’t they?
• The pandemic, we admit was a catastrophe upon all our plans, but the world needed a fresher outlook. What the pandemic essentially did was rip us off of our external identities. When the offices shut, there is no manager or assistant.
• Everyone found themselves returning to more human and social identities like father, husband, son, and friends, and we realized that our signs of progress were very linear. We ignored for the longest time, everything except our professional endeavors, and in a way, the pandemic called out on us for who we are.
• If nothing, in this one year you, you have collected better photographs with your family than ever before.

PUSHED US TO OMIT THE OUTDATED-

The world had its century-old way of conducting itself. Offices, schools, clinics, and other infrastructures that seemed so obvious and essential, are not even accessible to us anymore and we are doing quite alright. We don’t give ourselves enough credit for the way we held on to life even after everything familiar was taken away from us. But the pandemic and the lockdown made us question the very conduct of our everyday life. Do we still need to drive long hours and sit in offices when every meeting, every ideation, and every transfer of files and even money can happen virtually? We had never questioned before if we could disburden our children from the tight schedules by shifting few aspects of learning online.

• Once the pandemic is over, this culture of online education will give children a sense of control over their time. We know that the popular opinion of society makes us wonder if the digital lives of children will make them more sedentary in life, but there is a possibility of the contrary happening. Maybe education becomes a less tiring process for children and since they spend so much time inside their rooms, they might actually open up further to the idea of outdoor activities.
• Since this decade, we saw a major rise in the number of working women. Kudos to that! But working mothers have been struggling since they get lesser and lesser quality time to spend with their children.
• But the online office and school cultures will allow families to spend more time in each other’s physical vicinity. Maybe this is the breakthrough for our decade-long crisis of not being able to manage our ambitions and connections simultaneously.
• So there is an acute possibility that we have entered a phase that allows efficient human connection, rather than taking away from it as we feared.

ALL HAIL THE HEALTHCARE-

• Let us have a moment of honesty. None of us ever cared to say the word ‘immunity’ outside biology home-works and our doctor’s offices. But can we just count the number of times we have checked our child’s body temperature in the last one month? How many times have we checked our old parent’s breathing rate or blood pressure?
• The current scenario is a direct result of the paranoia that we are going through together, but as a country, we are so much more aware of our healthcare needs. Once we are through with this situation and we take the right lessons from it, the entire world will never take healthcare for granted.
• The healthcare system of the country including hospitals, pharmaceuticals, and even the standard of medical education will be introspected and amended for the good.
• No country was ready for a pandemic. No country had the resources to face a crisis as major as this one. But in India, the pandemic just revealed the state of health care in our country. Maybe when the crisis is over and we all make it, we can take a moment to be grateful that we now know what we need to work on.

EDUCATION- MORE ACCESSIBLE AND MORE AFFORDABLE-

There is no taking away from the tarnishing effect that the pandemic has had on the state of education globally. But the last one and a half years of running schools through online platforms have been surprisingly successful. We have seen adequate participation from students and consistent dissemination of knowledge through the teachers.

• What started as a temporary compensation for ‘real’ education has now become a full-fledged and efficient infrastructure of education. Maybe when we have the pandemic under control, we will all return to the good-old traditional classrooms and leave our children to share their lunchboxes once again.
• But it does forecast a brilliant future for education in remote places and schooling for unprivileged children. With the schools no longer having to maintain and run a physical infrastructure, the investment needed to establish a school is significantly lesser now. It is easier for the government to avail internet connection and smartphones t children than it is to build schools to accommodate all children in a country as populous as ours.
• So maybe our need of the hour and solutions for survival has led us towards a one-stop solution
  for a problem that we have been trying to tackle for ages- Illiteracy.

UNITY, COURAGE, AND SURVIVAL-

Do you remember reading fiction stories about aliens colonizing the Earth and all of humanity had to come together for our collective survival? We are living a less interesting but scarier version of the same story for a year now.

•  We are once again being reminded of what the first page in human evolution would tell us- that survival is a collective concept for human beings. We survive when we stick together (Or maintain a 3-feet distance from each other, in this instance.)
• The world desperately needed a reminder of our oneness. When the time came, we saw college students donating money, people selling their cars to donate oxygen cylinders, restaurants delivering free food, and people coming together to spread courage, and we have to admit that it is good to know that this is the world that we live in.

We would like to wrap this by taking you back to the popular idiom that says – “Time does not change people. It reveals who they really are.” And right now, it is more accurate than ever.

Let us not forget that we are going through a global shock and we all wake up to statistics that scare up. But never feel guilty for actively choosing to see the brighter side.

 

Also Read: Effects of technology on Education

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