At an airport on Friday, I chose to sit in a crowded area, for it had all the charging ports. It was considerably quiet and pleasant until a loud sound boomed across the room. A middle-aged man had broken into a violent coughing fit. Suddenly, the people around him became wary of their surroundings and reached out for their bags to grab their masks. And hardly any people were left by the time the man caught his breath.
It struck me for a reason: we've "returned to normal" for over a year now, so much so that one could say the phrase "new normal" has been somewhat banished by editors across newsrooms. It's been roughly two years since the second Covid-19 wave struck India, and for some reason, life often resembles something that never went through the horrid, painful experience of the pandemic.
There's a popular Reddit joke about this, too (there's one for everything). It goes....
Me in 2019: how could the world just come back to normal after Thanos—in Avengers Infinity War (2018)—snapped away half the population as if the world hadn't gone through a collective, deeply traumatic experience just a year ago?
Me in 2022: Oh!
End of the joke. You may take a moment to laugh.
But what I’m trying to point out is that we still bear the scars of the pandemic, perhaps only in subtle ways now. The oddities, though mostly invisible, are still in play and continue to skew personal behaviour as well as businesses. Industry veterans and observers like journalists alike are still trying to decode and interpret the economy-wide aberrations.
We tried to do the same again in some of our stories & articles this coming week.
