June 25, 2021 Commentary from the sofa

June 25, 2021 Commentary from the sofa: Perseverance. Patience. Hope. If the unprecedented COVID-19 experience has taught some of us something then it is awareness that things change radically with little warning. For the color festival of 2020 (Dol) I was with a close bondhu and others. That day, we had no idea how are lives will change. The next day, at Bangkok airport, I took a picture in which there was a Buddhist monk wearing a mask. I found that curious. In about two weeks everything changed. Without warning. Everything shut down. And soon all over the World. Salt Lake went into an unprecedented lock down along with the rest of the country. LA shut down its entertainment industry. Artists who were ready to launch their groundbreaking ideas simply had to apply the brakes. Today, carefully, the brake is being pulled back. But that period between the shutdown and the slow opening was an opportunity for those who could weather the storm of lost revenue. And there were the ones who had hope and the patience to persevere the downturn. They were like those who emerge in the post-Apocalyptic World where their lives were rudely put on hold, and now, they are tentatively coming back to the surface. Showing up again. Re-building their dreams. I have seen this in many people now. These are not the people who lost a job or got furloughed, but these are people who had build their profession and talents in the world before Holi of 2020. These are people who rely on their own initiative and their own creativity their own elbow grease to carve out special professional spaces that those spaces disappeared. I know people like that, and now as things are returning to normal their hope is back. But the people I know also did something important. They used the time to innovate. To change. To transform themselves. An online seller took the time to develop a new marketing campaign. A creative artist took the time to sharpen creativity – take it to a level that will be far better now than what they might have settled for if the pandemic had not happened. Is that a bad thing to say? To say that the death of 600,000 in America, or the death of the unaccounted in India might have offered an “opportunity” seems almost criminal. But when I see that there are new and good things emerging from the pause. It seems like that there is a hope. And this is no longer just a theoretical concept, but I am witnessing it in real people I know, I have come to admire, and I feel hopeful about. It is up to us to find the good in dire things. Those who are able to do that are the ones who survive, those are ones who eventually grow – and these are individuals – not corporations, not institutions, not with huge backings of deep pockets – but people who simply hunkered down, even experienced COVID-19, but said “We are the Champions.”

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