COVID-19 and A month of WFH

It's been a month now that I have been working from home and largely staying indoors. It was a few days before March 22 that our Goa office had started work from home. Most of Delhivery’s other offices starting from Gurgaon had been working from home already for around a couple of weeks by then due to the COVID-19 or Coronavirus pandemic.

It hasn’t been an easy time. Our generation hasn’t experienced anything like this in our lifetime. Weeks after weeks of staying indoors, social isolation and distancing due to the threat of an invisible enemy, the virus. Ours has been a fairly privileged generation; we haven’t seen any major wars or experienced any famines or pandemics so far. We were born at a time when India was opening up to the world economically and it was a wonderful time as things were just getting better for the upper middle class.

I was in a pretty routine in terms of physical fitness. I used to hit my gym, Fitness Bar almost 6 days in a week alternating between weight training and cardio. I was pretty intent on breaking the 81kg weight plateau that I had seemed to hit. However, with the gyms being closed, I didn’t let my spirit down initially. The gym announced they will hold group classes on Miramar beach and I decided to attend. The classes were cancelled in a day or two, but I continued to either run or cycle for sometime.

Then came the Janata Curfew by the Prime Minister on March 22nd. It was a day, what was the big deal. Considering how the virus is spreading, what would staying 14 hours indoors really do. That was just a trailer of what was about to come. By the end of Tuesday, 24th March, the Prime Minister announced an unprecedented nationwide lockdown for 21 days. All domestic trains and flights were stopped. International flights landing to India were already stopped. The nation was brought to a halt. Again. After an announcement at 8pm by the same Prime Minister.

Being a logistics company, for Delhivery, the lockdown meant finding a new normal. Hustling to find some way to make sense of the commotion and find a way to function. Work started meaning a lot more calls and a lot of ad hoc work as immediate priorities had changed completely. The government directive said that only movement of essential goods are permitted within the country. The company wasn’t prepared to identify what is essential and what isn’t in its network which moves more than a million shipments everyday. However, all that was about to change in a matter of days.

One of the tough things being locked down with a 19 month toddler is keeping patience after a hectic day of work and household chores. My work has been more intense than it ever was in Delhivery. Patience is at an all time low in the evening and it's tough not to get annoyed even at the cute little kid that Anshul is. The mind is out of creative ways to entertain him or distract him from the animal videos he wants me to play for him on youtube. We’ve tried very hard to restrict his screen time for a very long time and we now seem to be failing in the lockdown. This feeling of failing after a day’s work is extremely depressing. It feels like we are failing at parenting. Failing at what we had decided very strongly about. I hope we find peace and a new normal. Maybe allowing some screen time is needed now for the sake of our own sanity. Maybe we shouldn’t be punishing ourselves so much for it and work on weaning him off when the times are better.

#covid19 #coronavirus #lockdown #jantacurfew #wfh #workfromhome #kids #parenting #fitness