Being Your Own Boss

Crisis is opportunity? Yes, the pandemic may have left India’s economy as a vast swathe of devastated soil, but behold those flourishing green shoots of entrepreneurship

- OLM Desk

In March 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic invaded India, who had thought it would bring us to the cusp of the unknown in so many ways? And yet, here we are, after sixteen months, on the verge of redefining ourselves. Our initial exasperation with the lockdown, with being imprisoned at home, and the home itself being turned into an office, were only the first, material steps in dismantling the world as we knew it. Over a year of coping with a real fear of sickness and death, and of being touched by personal and collective tragedy, added a keen psychological element to that disturbing of settled paradigms—what ensued for many was a deep interrogation of the self and everything out there. It was, relatively speaking, a small duration of time in everyone’s life—even if it seemed like an aeon spent in hell. But perhaps because of that last bit, enduring it has been a truly transformational event.

It was not a purely inner transformation, of course, generated autonomously by individuals or by some group spiritual activity. Most parts of it were forced on people by inimical factors outside of them. The lives of uncounted millions were devastated by the economic paralysis—many by the appearance of the dreaded pink slip, handed by the companies. The companies, many themselves in crisis, in a sense though of themselves as entities separate from their employees—instead of harboring them in a time of common crisis, they chose to leave them out in the storm. That experience of separation, a kind of estrangement, itself came to forge a different kind of thinking. That’s why this crisis birthed a new phenomenon. People began to think for themselves, and of themselves as autonomous agents. They became their own boss.