Quarantine Experience across Generations

The month of March of year 2020 is dedicated to Corona Virus across the Globe and the respective governments of each nation are advising their people to quarantine at their home, lockdown so as to break the chain of the virus and limit its spread.

Our Prime Minister Narender Modi has also taken similar decision of Janta Curfew and Lockdown. The best thing which I personally applied from the advice of Modi ji is to maintain Social distancing and minimize Emotional distancing. Since we all are experiencing this strange type of circumstances which we all wished for but not exactly like this…. (we always wanted family time, rest at home, watching favourite programs, enjoying at own pace etc., but not caging ourselves with the mental and emotional stress of human crisis at such a long time)

So, I decided to follow positive path of minimizing emotional distancing by E – Socializing with my family and friends. During our conversation on wats app, videocall, facebook, and other social media, I got experiences of people across generations including small kids, school going kids, college students, married couple, parents at home, parents working from home, grand parents etc

Let me share few of them in their own words with general profile details

Young girl just married last year: My experience is indifferent between getting bore and busy, as I am working for home and not working for any office. Lockdown experience is more like a 2-month holidays which we use to get when we were at school. As a citizen of India, I am obeying the prime minister’s appeal to us but I also want to go out n help the needy ones, the poor people, street animals who are solely dependent on humans.

Another young man working from home: Shared the Positives and Negatives. Positives include:  happy to be able to work rather than sitting ideal; Getting more time to spend with my family and enjoying the family moments; started doing YOGA in morning and night walk on terrace. The negatives include:  Working from home makes me tired in less time resulting in little frustration; Latency in system & IT issues results in delay in completion of my work.; Negative vibes are coming from everyone and everyone is afraid of their future.

Parents experience includes: During this period, we remained in touch with our sons & families through video calling. We really enjoyed talking to our grandchildren and know about their activities on daily basis. The most positive aspect of this lockdown for us is the telecast of 33 years old serials Ramayan and Mahabharata. Since our maid is also not coming due to lockdown, we are managing all house hold works ourselves. My wife is more spiritual and spends time in praying and doing household activities.

A husband and wife both working in financial MNC firms, are finding working from home in lockdown situation extremely challenging, managing all household activities, take care of kids, help them during their online classes (which have recently started), and work for office sometime more than 9 hours. This sometimes also brings additional difficulty when everyone is using same wifi and network becomes slow. However, in this challenging time, our family does not forget to enjoy. In the evening we spend quality time together. During the weekend the whole family watch movies, my daughter is learning music online, helping us with cleaning and household activities, together we play indoor games and the whole family tries to make best of the situation.

An independent girl has just moved to UK for office work is finding unimagined problems like finding apartment, then taking extra precautions of health and hygiene, struggling to find time to buy essential daily groceries and compromising on her daily fitness regime and her socializing skills. She has concern for her friends facing problems and her family in India. She has strategically altered her daily time table to keep herself updated, entertained, energized and at the same time effective and efficient at work. She says that its time to be flexible and adjust our mental and emotional state to new levels of work life wellbeing.

Kids at home are at the best of their time, no need to get up early morning, get ready with uniform, then attending school and following the entire schedule like machines. They are happy to watch more of their favourite serials and toons and spending time at their will, but yes missing time with friends, going out to play and forced to help in household tasks and getting extra spice of advices from parents.

And many of similar experiences just signify that this phase of life has jittered everyone to analyse of what they are running for and rethink of what is really important and essential in life.

Dr. Shilpa Wadhwa

Assistant Professor – I Business Institute