Blog

Monday April 20, 2020 will be known in history as the End of an Era (Pre-COVID) and the beginning of a new one (Post-COVID). The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) got its name from a disease caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) (Source: WHO). It got its name because it was first discovered in Wuhan, China in 2019 (New Scientist). In 2020, the pandemic is far bigger than just a disease caused by the virus. It has far-reaching economic, social and political implications. COVID20 is the handle used to describe these events that have come into focus in 2020. But as is true of every major watershed in history, there are antecedents that led up to the crisis and the world after it, will not be the same as it was before.

Why April 20th? It is the day that the restrictions caused by the COVID Lockdown caused a negative crude oil price, in the first time in history (Forbes)

Now that you have seen this data, watch this video (youtube) to see why this is not the best representation of the data, and why this one is better. Didn’t I tell you …or did I?.. that epidemiology requires teasing out information from data?

This correction is thanks to Amit Fenn, our family biologist.

The spread of COVID 19 has yet to reach its peak, and yet COVID 20 is already here. COVID20 is an expanded version of the crisis that includes the socio-economic and political fall out of the disease as well as the direct impact of the continuing growth of the pandemic. COVID 19 was named such because the disease was first documented in China in Dec 2019 (see a timeline of events from WHO here), but COVID 20 is the state of things in 2020. Its no longer just a disease caused by the Novel Corona Virus, COVID 20 is not even just a health care problem, it’s much more than that. It has impacted our lives in far greater ways than any other disease since the Bubonic Plague of the 14th Century (History.com), that left almost 50% of the population of Europe dead.

India, like much of the world, has been under a 21-day lockdown since March 24th (BBC). The lockdown, like everything else, is the result of a set of circumstances that came together. The first is the growth of digital media, where such a plan can be formulated and sent out to a large number of people without delay. The second is the political reality of India, a combination of a Charismatic Prime Minister and a large number of dedicated party-workers. who worked tirelessly to give him a landslide electoral victory in 2019 (BBC). 2019 was a difficult year for India, the Indian economy was teetering on the edge by Dec 2019, and in a sense, it was a blessing in disguise that Covid 19 wiped the entire board clean.

When will we wake up from the nightmare?

Not for a long time. Perhaps the world will never get back to what it was Pre-Covid. First, there was the one day People’s Lockdown. Then came the 21 Day Lockdown on March 24th, 2020 Will it all end one day in April?

The short answer? NO. Antonio Guterres, the chief of United Nations is already calling it the most challenging crisis since the second world war. The Managing Director of the IMF, Kristaline Georgieva calls it Humanity’s Darkest Hour. The World Bank President, David Malpass put it in black and white on his LinkedIn post when he said: “Beyond the health impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic, we are expecting a major global recession.” Major events divide history into periods before and after the event. The second world war was such an event. the fall of Constantinople is often considered another one. In modern times, COVID 19 certainly qualifies as a catastrophe of global proportions. So what happened while the world was asleep? What kind of world will we awaken to?

1. Family & Personal Life

How has your personal life been affected by the Lockdown? Perhaps you found more time to pursue something you have been wanting to do for a long time, reading or perhaps practising that guitar that has been gathering dust in the corner. How has family-time changed your family? Has it helped to bring out and resolve some issues that were always brushed under the carpet? Perhaps you learnt to appreciate your family better? Or maybe you had time to take a philosophical bent of mind, to wonder about the fragility of life, perhaps even start a regular meditation practice that could potentially change your life forever. There are those who decided to use this time to learn something new, thanks to the number of good quality courses offered at discounts or offered for free.

Has there been a change in roles in the family? No longer does the man have to go to the office to earn a living. When everyone is stuck at home, has it changed the way things are done at home? Is there a greater family involvement in chores and how housework is shared?

Not all of the changes are positive. For some, it has been a trying time. Here is an email from a friend struggling with anxiety and panic disorder for 24 years: “ (When my anxiety increased), …Even my husband was surprised. I used to complain of loneliness and now i was not alone so why anxiety? One main reason was that I have this deep trust in doctors and now the place which is most safe for me ..hospitals/clinics are the most unsafe. So if I fall sick how can I get better without doctor’s help? My therapist said I am overthinking and my psychologist friend suggested that my husband tie me to a chair if I start screaming to go to emergency… unless I have something more serious than Covid19!“

2. The Environment:

For years our race to turn the tide of ecological damage has been a losing race. Those among us who were optimistic found themselves hard put to stay positive as each day brought news of further calamity. Even in February 2020, an iceberg the size of MALTA broke off from a glacier in Antarctica.

Increasingly desperate measures to put in place measurable quotas for reduction of greenhouse gases have met with considerable debate and discord, with many environmentalists in despair of reaching targets. Everyone was worried that the reduction of greenhouse gases would mean in some ways curtailing industrial output and this, in turn, would undermine the competitive edge of the country. Perhaps it would be the harbinger of a severe recession?

The Novel Corona Virus achieved what world leaders could not achieve with years of negotiation at Kyoto, Paris, etc. As economic activity shuts down and people stay at home, animals take to urban streets and global pollution levels have dropped significantly. Of the 30 most polluted cities of the world in 2019, 21 of them were in India (Wikipedia). The lockdown has had an unprecedented reduction of India’s pollution too. Even the earth’s crust seems to be healing (nature.com). Perhaps the COVID Virus will be the much-needed correction that our industry needs in order to save a dying planet. Perhaps the virus itself is an ecosystem responding to threats to its existence?

3. Healthcare

Perhaps nowhere else would the impact of COVID 19 be as direct as in healthcare management. The pandemic forced us to reconsider our priorities. Healthcare once again re-focussed priorities on the Economics of Healthcare, Public Health, Epidemiology and Prevention. This may bring about a sea change in THINKING when it comes to healthcare, and a focus on community and scientific prevention of the spread of communicable diseases like never before. Once again the health of the community is what is important and not just the patient within the walls of the hospital.

For decades the average age of people in developed nations has been getting higher. Healthcare systems work as long as there are young people working in the economy and paying for those who cannot work. A disease like COVID 19 would take a greater toll on those who are old and sick changing the profile of the “herd”. Much in the way, The Plague changed the demographics of 14th century Europe

4.Science

The 21st Century showed a distinct fall from grace when it comes to science. Although science helped us stave off hunger and disease, helped us fight wars, travel and communicate across vast distances, things began to change in the second half of the 20th century. The Atom Bomb forced us to see that science could have darker sides too. While the green revolution helped us escape the Malthusian Bomb, Rachel Carson opened our eyes to the price we had to pay for it. Add to it, several aspects of the post-modern world view also chipped away at the facade of science as a saviour of mankind. Young students moved away from college degrees in science, moving to business majors instead.

With a number of wild claims floating around about the Corona Virus there was a great need for credible information. And that meant people turned to experts and scientists for verifiable information. The medical community also was facing a crisis with many of the challenges of communicable diseases were already met. Of course, there was the spectre of Multi-Drug-Resistant germs, but it was yet to develop into a credible threat. Covid brought back the Romance of Medicine like a Robin Cook novel. It’s a high-stakes game of life or death. It includes sleuthing and incarceration and the heroes are the doctors.

5. Politics and International Institutions

Given the global shutdown of several sectors of the economy, there are many who predict a recession on a global scale. This may not be bad for everyone. By the end of 2019, the Indian economy was in shambles. This did not bode well for the ruling party. However, the COVID 19 was such shock that it wiped the books clean. Yes, we are still heading for a recession but the bad fiscal policy could no longer be faulted for it. The parallel with the impact of 9/11 on the 2001 economic crisis is unmistakable. In other parts of the world too, the Novel Corona Virus allowed people to further their own political agenda (The Guardian)

With the fall of the USSR and the passing of the cold war era, many things have changed on the world stage of geopolitics. With the end of the Warsaw Pact (Brittanica) and the emergence of a new unipolar era (or is it multipolar? – Taylor and Francis), the role of International Institutions like the United Nations and World Health Organization have lost much of its relevance. However, with a pandemic like COVID 19, spreading across the globe with scant regard to political borders, the only way to contain it is to join hands to take a stand against it. Once again, agencies of international collaboration like the WHO, IMF and the World Bank, have new relevance in today’s age. Perhaps it is the beginning of a new era of international collaboration. Certainly, the one thing that is obvious, is that the piece-meal approach to global problems is not working!

6. Economics

We were already aware that the system needed change. In an interview with Forbes, Steven Chu likened the (Pre-COVID) world economy to a global Ponzi scheme. A significant number of economists believe that economic progress is reflected in Economic Growth, ie; an increase in the goods produced and sold in any economic unit like a country. This leads to an unhealthy focus on production and consumption for its own sake. Economies are measured by the percentage of “growth“. Consume more, then the producers will make more, which will create more jobs and this will put more money in the pockets of consumers who will, in turn, buy more. Is it just me…. or does this sound like a Ponzi Scheme? COVID 19 has shown us that we do not have robust social institutions that can protect our weaker sections. Wealth distribution is flawed with the top 10% holding over 75% of the wealth of India. It is time to recognize our economic models are flawed. Perhaps it is time for our Economic Model to Change

Economic growth is usually distinguished from economic development, the latter term being restricted to economies that are close to the subsistence level. 

https://www.britannica.com/topic/economic-growth

But there is another crisis playing out, the unorganized sector(Times of India ). A large number of people in India who live a hand to mouth existence. Each day’s wages from labour is what puts food on the table. Large numbers of men who work in other states far from their own families find that they do not have wages to pay the rent or money to send home. Without this families will go hungry, crime is likely to increase as people get desperate, and the death toll would be significant. It would not be a surprise to find that, at least in India, more people die from the economic hardships of COVID 19 than the virus itself. This is COVID 20.

Read part 2 of this article here.

There are many who would agree to me that COVID-19 is what N. Taleb calls a Black Swan event (youtube link 4:05 min) Even when it was reported on Dec 31 2019, not many of us thought it would disrupt the world like it has today. Social scientists given to Systems Theory would call it a Catastrophe, not in the literary sense of the end of everything, but as the end of something old and the beginning of something new (Science Direct article link). It was just an event horizon, something that we could not see beyond, like a bend in the road. So what brings about such catastrophic events? How do such events break up the comfortable life that we once knew? Those who believe in Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence (Brittanica.com)would be quick to point out that there is a periodicity in the pattern of global pandemics. We just weren’t looking at that cycle that is all. However, there are those who would say that it is a result of sensitive dependence on initial conditions (Glassnert and Weiss, 1998). ( If you are wondering what’s so strange about that, here is the Wikipedia link. ) The conditions were all building up, we just didn’t see them that is all. So what were the conditions for this catastrophe?

Initial Conditions (Precedents)

1. Travel: Viruses are transmitted by hosts. The Great Bubonic plague of the 14th century was triggered by the bacterium Yersinia Pestis, which lived in the flea that lived on the black rat. The black rat itself was transported along the silk route to the Crimea and from there by ships to other locations (Wikipedia). So it was a bacteria spread by a flea transported by rats who were transported along the trade routes (silk route). Interestingly the article suggests that the Plague existed in South Asia before that. One way to look at it is that when a pathogen reaches a new population, they have very little resistance to it and cause havoc. This is well discussed in the history of Syphilis (Wikipedia). Some say that the native American population was decimated by diseases that were brought by the colonizers, others say that Columbus and his sailors brought it to Europe from the colonies. Sometimes the disease is known by the place where it spread first. Syphilis was called the “French Disease” because it was first brought back from Naples by returning French Soldiers. Covid-19 was also known by the place where it was first detected. But that is a rather unscientific way of looking at it.
2. The Sixth Extinction (Wikipedia description of the book): There have been five mass extinctions that have happened before this (National Geographic). They were not manmade. They say the sixth extinction is manmade. But isn’t man part of nature? While it is tempting to blame unbridled human greed as the cause of this extinction, there is another way to look at it. As system evolves, its parameters change and then the old subsystems become unviable. This is not to say the end of everything, perhaps we have just reached the peak of our era. It is time to hit the reset button. In an extremely complex ecosystem called earth, humans do not control the reset button. A single virus could achieve what climate change experts have been trying to do for YEARS! Did global warming trigger the right conditions for the virus to emerge? Are there more waiting to emerge, say under the melting permafrost of the Arctic and Antarctic? What would the RESET button be like? Does the human race have the resilience to survive this?
3. Epidemiology For a quick technical overview of the subject from NCBI, click here: (Surely Covid-19 is not the only disease to sweep the globe in recent years (Science Direct)? Why is the Novel Coronavirus different? Perhaps its got to do with the fact that it spreads faster and more rapidly. Perhaps its because we monitor health more closely, especially for communicable diseases. In 1854, there was an outbreak of cholera in London (Wikipedia). At the time, it was thought that diseases like Cholera were caused by Miasma or bad air. (Perhaps it is has a parallel in today’s theory of droplet contamination that requires negative pressure isolation wards with negative room air-pressure when dealing with Ebola and other contagious diseases (Wikipedia).) Although Louis Pasteur had not proposed the Germ Theory yet, Dr John Snow, a physician was not convinced that Cholera was caused by bad Air (UCLA, Dept of Epidemiology, Fielding School of Public Health). He turned detective, and by tracking down cases, he showed that almost all the infection cases happened to people who used a particular handpump in Broadway, London. He then had the pump handle removed, effectively stopping the epidemic (watch a Harvard video on it here… youtube: 8 min (the video also tells us why it was safer to drink BEER than water.) Epidemiology is the where medicine, biology and social sciences meet. Advances in testing and mathematical modelling of epidemics (Elsevier), make it very important to detect early, predict the spread and take containment measures. Hence the alarm-bells go off early.
4. A social phenomenon and a media circus: Today almost 100% of all news channels contain news of the progress of Covid-19 across the world. Informal channels are choked with half baked truths about the disease. The Govt machinery has the unprecedented reach to declare a lockdown, asking people to stay indoors. The conditions are very similar to life on active frontlines of a war. People worry about dwindling supplies and when it will all be over. Most of us do not know how the lockdown will help in anything but delay the progress of the disease. Flattening the curve is not because there are fewer people sick, but because they will be sick over a longer time frame. But the good thing is that people have come together to stay away in order to protect the vulnerable. For most of us COVID 19, is not a threatening disease unless you belong to the vulnerable section. Vulnerability in terms of COVID 19 means…
   1. Age above 70
   2. Asthmatic
   3. Diabetic
   4. Immuno-compromised
   5. People who are already weak from another infection or serious disease

In short, most people are undergoing unprecedented hardship, to protect people like me and others who belong to the vulnerable group. It’s no wonder why an observation made by the Cultural Anthropologist, Margret Mead (Forbes) has resurfaced as a meme in the era of Covid 19.

Next: What happens after the lockdown is over? Read part 2 of this article.

Have you ever been at a loss of words to express what you felt? I first developed the five circles to explain the inner journey many years ago in an online course I did for a year with Shwetaa Shah. I have used it in many places since then.

1. The Transactional world is the world we live in ordinarily. A world where sentences are taken literally, and we make promises we can keep and enter into contracts etc. In this world, we think logically and express ourselves in correct syntax. (Logic, Syntax)
2. The symbolic world is the world where poets use words to craft experiences and painters paint pictures that represent things that we don’t always have words to express. Its a world where metaphor and symbols reign. Often using two words close to each other in a text is more important than what the sentence means syntactically.
3. The emotional world is often beyond words, experiences/feelings that are intense and leave us at a loss for words. In this world it is hard to adequately represent something, even symbolically. Often there is only one thing to do, to be Present and to allow ourselves to FEEL, knowing any form of experience will always take away something from it.
4. The unconscious represents things things that we are not even fully aware of, information we process before it even reaches our awareness.  The simplest form of this is a strange sense of a presence in the room when there is no one there. Another example is that of Dichotic Hearing. Our intuitions and hunches often originate at this level and then bubble up to our conscious awareness through the subsequent layers. This is why it is so difficult to understand the logic behind our intuition. Yet we can learn to understand it and trust it.
5. Pure Awareness: At the centre of it all lies pure awareness, the cogito in Descarte’s famous dictum. This is an outward looking awareness. Even an image seen in the mirror is seen as yet another visual object and not as the self. The unconscious realm lies beneath this too. But this is the bedrock, the foundation of consciousness.

The only thing to add is that the boundary lines between each circle is made of anxiety (fear). What this means is that in order to go from one level to another we have to go through anxiety.

---

To understand more about the epistemology behind this, read this paper on Gestalts.

Applications

Applications:

• Therapy: Those who have worked in the therapeutic setting can clearly distinguish these different layers. If the goal of therapy is an integrated person, then the therapist helps the client go through different layers, with an attitude of what Carl Rogers calls Unconditional Positive Regard. When the client learns to adopt the right attitude to understanding oneself at all levels, it leads to a person being more integrated. The initial part of this conceptual map was created during my work with Schizophrenia
• Meditation: Practitioners of meditation experience the journey through these different levels of consciousness. One could even say that it is the purpose of meditation.
  • However, it is interesting to note that when speaking of metaphysics (the nature of things), it is often described inside out. The innermost realm of pure consciousness or awareness is considered primordial, in the sense that it exists first. Let’s say it is what a baby is born with. The rest of the layers are things that we develop over time.
• Creativity: Understanding creativity requires an understanding of the five circles. It also involves understanding and facilitating the movement between them. The easier it is to traverse between the circles the easier it is to access our creativity
• Productivity: Anyone who has access to only the outer circle may well be a great manager, able to manage everything logically, allocating time and resources to get the job done. But she would still be using only a small part of the resources that could be available to her.

In my years of life as an employee, entrepreneur, consultant and life coach, I have observed that the biggest challenge to career growth is… not knowing what to do… quite literally. When faced with a high stakes decision, some people are sucked by the quicksand of indecision. Making a decision involves taking responsibility for outcomes. What if I am wrong? This is the most paralyzing affliction in modern life. Earlier, it was easy, we just had to do what we are told and the gears of society/culture would lock-in and convert that into something. But as Durkheim would put it, anomie leads to ennui and in a society where old norms have fallen and new are yet to evolve it’s hard to know what to do.

In Business Schools the hardest topic to teach is ethics. That’s because it does not go with the basic premise of management education – how to make more money. Unlike finance, hr, marketing etc., learning ethics will not teach you how to make more money. Ethics is not about How to do anything it’s about What to do. I call this the Ethical Imperative. We behave ethically because it’s the right thing to do, that’s it.

So next time you find yourself in the quicksand of indecision, remember this….

Not making a decision is far worse than making the wrong one. Not deciding does not absolve you from all responsibility about the outcome. That is a decision too.

In an online conversation today I was discussing death with a client (as Rogers would put it). I told him the anxiety of death comes from the unknown, we live in the illusion that life is predictable and controllable. That is nothing but an illusion. But it forms the basis of day-to-day life. The solution lies in embracing (accepting fully and joyfully) that life is by it’s very definition, unpredictable.

To all my students who want to study hard to find a job, here’s news. That job will not be there by the time you finish your education. So what are you preparing for?

I recently facilitated an internship in a niche hi-performance position. This is what I wrote to the candidate…

I am excited about your Internship with my friend in The Niche Company. Not because he will make you a professional, but because he will break you and remake you.

That is the process… To break and remake again and again and again until you become like water and can flow and take any shape.

Thomas Kuhn wrote the book on Paradigms and Paradigm Shifts. Few people know that shortly after it, he wrote Essential Tension, in which he pointed out that science moves forward because there are people who are unhappy with scientific traditions, but are unhappy at making a clean break with them. They stay within the fold and push boundaries, rather than make a clean break.

New research from Sloan reiterates that disruption is not the only way to innovate. Non disruptive innovation, although not fashionable, is just as important.

https://www.thebetterindia.com/115673/remembering-anant-pai-the-storyteller-who-took-indias-epics-and-history-to-its-children/

A master storyteller, Uncle Pai has done an unmatched service towards keeping what UNDP calls Intangible Heritage alive and well. His work is no less than The Statue of Unity, except it’s intangible. I guess we will have more articles on intangible heritage soon.

I believe many of us use two different languages. One for personal things we connect to emotionally and the other professional language is designed to hide our true feelings and to “make an impression”.

I remember an Accenture consultant who came home for dinner. My wife naively asked what do you do? He said something like… “we leverage the clients knowledge assets through our robust processes to deliver maximum value to our clients and their stakeholders.” I burst out laughing seeing my wife’s confused look. I said that is consultant – speak. His wife told us if you wake him from his sleep he will say this and go back to sleep.
In my classes whenever I hear language like this, I ask them to translate into English please.

First published as a response to a LinkedIn post. Read it here.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6292837037116620800

What if we had it wrong at all? Have you wondered what is the real purpose of work? Traditional answers include “to provide for the family” or to “make dreams come true”. Fact is that the present way we organise work and contracts is relatively new to the history of human civilisation. There is already some evidence that this approach may not last forever. Some of these jobs moved to countries that had lower wages, other jobs themselves got obsolete and now there is talk of robots taking over more and more jobs. In today’s world what we do is an important part of our identity. Often on meeting a new person, our second question is about the person’s professional work. How would all this be if, in the future, the primary source of family income is from a guaranteed a Minimum Basic Income instead of wages paid for employment?

The Bagavad Gita describe Karma Yoga as one of the four ways for spiritual advancement. What if we, for the present, consider the possibility that the primary value of work is to aid in spiritual growth? At this point work will no longer be primarily valued in economic terms. When viewed from this perspective work is not just the job we are paid to do, it includes everything we do to express ourselves and to contribute to society. To achieve the goal of spiritual progress, there are some ethical imperatives about HOW we work. For the purpose of this discussion we will call this work ethic Karma Yoga.

Basic Rules of Karma Yoga includes

1. All work is important and the difference is only in our attitude towards work.

2. Our work is a GIFT we cannot put a price on it.

3. Our responsibility is to do our best. The outcome depends on many factors beyond our control.

4. Work from a sense of wonder and love (otherwise known as compassion), don’t let fear of failure be the motivating factor

5. You have a choice about what you want to believe about people around you. Believe they are good, even when evidence SEEMS to point otherwise. Learn to trust people and processes around you

6. Be outward looking. Focus on the world and on the task at hand, not on yourself.

7. Courage Don’t spend your time wondering if you can do something, you will never know unless you try..and keep trying.

8. Take each challenge as an opportunity to learn and enhance your skills.

10. A sense of “play”: What if life is a playground and if we can approach work too with a sense of playfulness.

Above all cultivate mindfulness – this is the single most important rule. It may be difficult at first but with practice one can get better at it.