What did hit me hard though was the realisation that this city isn’t built for people to stay home, that unless you’re affluent, home is just a place where you sleep.F Annie Zaidi(Photo courtesy Harneet Singh)įrom all over the world, videos emerged showing people singing in their balconies, but most apartments in Mumbai don’t have balconies. While the disruption rattled the upper middle class and the privileged, uncertainty is something that artists and writers live with, as do the poor, whether it’s a consequence of meagre earnings or one illness in the family that drives you below the poverty line. It’s very inspiring.Īs a freelance writer, I’ve always dealt with uncertainty. I find it rejuvenating to be in my small world: what I’m doing with the Baro Market, working within the same India but showing the parts of it that I really celebrate: the small brands the crafts people working in collaboration.
So I have started to live in a gated community of minds people who think and feel the same way. To me, it’s maddening that intelligent people buy into ideas like India is doing fantastic because the stock market is booming or fascism. My life has also become smaller in a sense. I can do that within my microcosm: help put lives right and change mindsets, and perhaps try and get more people to ensure that within their microcosms, they build a world that’s better than the one outside. This is the new reality, so what can you do? You can empower science, get better systems in place for vaccinations, but more importantly, I wish the world would get better legislations in place for wealth to be distributed more equitably. I heard one panel of experts discuss how there is likely to be another in a few years – because that’s the world we’ve created. It’s no one’s fault, the pandemic, but certainly how you deal with it is in your control. I feel a lot of anger about how things are being dealt with. The pandemic highlighted how horribly divided the world is. I was intensely busy, building a whole new business while trying to deal with the fact that there’s a pandemic so you can’t work as you normally would. I had to reset our business plan, so it wasn’t all downtime to sit and reflect. The world had shut down, but you can’t shut down your responsibilities, with salaries to pay and commitments to keep. I had never spent so much time at home with Mahesh, my dogs and the staff who were with us. We walked every day at high noon when there was nobody on the street.
One total lockdown lessons world professional#
Five Mumbaiites - a restaurateur, a design entrepreneur, a writer, an architect and a businessperson in the fashion industry - speak to Anjana Vaswani about what the pandemic and the subsequent shutdown taught them in their personal and professional lives.ĭuring the total lockdown, for the first time in my life, I watched shows and really enjoyed some of the docu-series like Narcos, The Last Dance, The Crown. The past year brought us face to face with adversity, loss and loneliness in a way we may have never experienced before.
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