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This week marks two years since India went into lockdown, on March 24, 2020. It was among the world’s widest, strictest and most sudden lockdowns, and one that affected more people than almost any other such shutdown in the world.
In the first wave, all of India hunkered down at home for 21 days. As the restrictions were extended by a few weeks more, then a few months more, the pandemic raged outside.
It tested everything: our strengths and weaknesses as individuals, a society, an economy, a network of communities. People suffered personal tragedies, as larger ones unfolded on the streets, in a country not prepared to contend with these levels of distress.
We tracked doubling rates and mortality rates, distracted ourselves with recipes for banana bread and at-home workouts. We tested the limits of our playlists, watchlists, wifi connections, our relationships, our patience.
We counted our blessings, missing the bustle of office life, but bidding good riddance to the commute. We watched wildlife wander into the streets of major cities, and missed being outdoors even more. We watched more TV than we thought possible but wondered if the cataclysms on screen could ever compete with the ones we might face in the real world.
We saw loved ones suffer, suffered loss. We also witnessed humanity at its best, rallying to organise meals, oxygen cylinders, tips on which three-layered masks work best.
And we cheered as the vaccines rolled out, offering, at the very least, a sense of hope.
The last two years seem like both a blip in our timelines and a lifetime in themselves. And for some, the darkest clouds brought with them unexpected rays of hope. They dreamed bigger in the safety of their bedrooms, took bigger risks, opened their hearts wider. Found solace in the little things, made the mundane matter, recast tragedy as new chapters for the future. Meet people who pivoted, amid the pandemic, emerging with lives lived better.
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Finding his way home to daddy: Jayant Shankar
Jayant Shankar, 35, a brand solutions manager based in Bengaluru, has emerged from the pandemic a better husband and father, he says, with a family more connected and at peace than they were before it began.
It started out in chaos. Shankar and Menaka Warrier’s second child, Kedar, was born a week before the first lockdown. They were in a relatively new city, having moved from Mumbai to Bengaluru less than a year earlier. And now there were six of them — Shankar and Warrier, then 33; two-year-old Kabir, newborn Kedar, and Shankar’s parents — confined to a two-bedroom flat.
“There were crying babies, flaring tempers, skewed routines, and a lot of ambiguity about what the future looked like for us,” Shankar says.
Being a hands-on dad started to mean something completely different. “I’d always been hands-on. In fact, the biggest compliment I ever got was a snide comment from a relative who said ‘Kabir has two mothers’,” Shankar says. But through his two years as a dad, he’d spend more than eight hours at work every day.
Now, “I felt like I wasn’t giving my work 100%. I was at odds with myself and it was hurting my relationships with the wife and kids.” He and his wife began to argue more often, usually about whose time mattered more.
Realising that he could be handling it all better, Shankar decided to work with his therapist to find a healthier way forward. Together, they reframed the pandemic as a chance for a fresh start. Working from home, Shankar realised, meant that he could be the kind of family man he had always wanted to be — present as well as hands-on.
He vowed to never go back to his workaholic ways of shutting himself off from the world. He and Warrier designed a set of parenting rules to make their lives easier. “We have an open-door policy, where the kids — especially Kabir, who is now four — are allowed to be part of my work life. I make time to play or answer questions between work calls.”
Warrier says it’s been a relief to see that Shankar isn’t stretching himself to breaking point anymore. “We have always wanted to be equally involved in raising our kids. Thanks to the pandemic we’ve developed a dynamic where that’s possible. Jayant is part of small and large decisions alike when it comes to the kids,” she says.
Determined to keep to a hybrid workplace, Shankar switched jobs earlier this year. “We’ve moved into a larger house too, knowing that I will continue working from home. We are looking to travel a lot more, to give our babies a more holistic view of life,” he says.
On a recent workcation to Warrier’s hometown in Kerala, the family spent days collecting raw mangoes, climbing trees and meeting doting relatives who are teaching the children new Malayalam words every day. “I’m glad their founding years are being spent surrounded by loved ones, nature, and parents who could give them and each other the time and attention we all deserve,” Shankar says.
As a couple, Shankar and Warrier have reverted to texting, “like we did when we were dating” Shankar says, laughing. Most of the texts are anticipatory messages about the “fun life awaiting us after 9 pm,” he adds, “when we catch up on things that need more attention than a text message, pour each other a drink, and pat ourselves on the back for another day well-managed.”
– Anesha George
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A plan for food aid that fits on a Post-it: Harsh Mav & Taruna Mav
From selling meals to handing them out for free and now hoping to rope in customers to pay it forward, it’s been a rollercoaster two years for caterers Harsh Mav, 32, and his mother Taruna Mav, 57. When the first lockdown hit, they were running Mom & Co, a tiffin service sending out 120 meals a day, and in the process of scaling up with a first round of funding. Overnight, the Mavs lost both the clients and the funding.
They still had food stocks in reserve, and Harsh’s sister Shivani Mav, 27, was now available to help, since the restaurant she worked at had shut temporarily too. Rather than dwell on what the future held for them, they decided to act.
They pooled ₹70,000 from their savings and began a fresh cycle of over 100 meals a day, this time with no paying customers. “We saw how desperate the situation was for others,” Harsh says. So they distributed free meals to those who were now stranded, with no work and no earnings, in the slums near the family’s Navi Mumbai home. Some days it was khichdi, other days a vegetable gravy and rice.
It wasn’t easy. “If we ever did this again, I’d like to have a bigger team to be able to delegate and make more meals with less effort,” Taruna Mav says. Still, they were able to keep it up for about three weeks before they ran out of funds.
In April 2020, they posted on Instagram, asking for donations. Since that post, they have raised ₹4.25 lakh for their food aid programme. “Someone volunteered to let us use their school van for distribution too,” Harsh says.
By August 2020, they switched to weekly rations. By mid-2021, they were distributing paid, discounted and free food to Covid patients. Now, Mom & Co is back in business, as a catering service. They still occasionally hand out ration kits to the needy.
Harsh is now striking out on his own, setting up a cloud kitchen with a few elements inspired by the work the Mavs did together. The pandemic taught him two things, he says: First, that poverty and hunger in Mumbai are more extreme than he could have imagined; second, that feeding people was really not that expensive.
Long ago, he’d seen a YouTube video about an Udupi restaurant somewhere in India that offered meals for the homeless. Patrons could donate a meal or a dish from the menu, by writing it down on a Post-it and pasting it on a dedicated wall. Anybody could then walk in, pick a Post-it and get the dish for free.
Harsh plans to replicate this idea in his operation. “The cloud kitchen’s app will have a wall feature where customers can donate a simple meal and we’ll be distribute them, every day, for lunch and dinner. A certain number of free meals will probably be part of any hospitality project I start in the future,” he says.
– Natasha Rego
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Piecing together the perfect palette: Shantanu Dhope
Shantanu Dhope’s pandemic-era silver lining came in the form of eyeliner. A whole make-up kit, actually.
Dhope, 26, is a trained makeup artist. “I’ve been wearing makeup since I was 19,” he says. He’s sported colourful looks in public for years, including at the big-brand cosmetics retail outlet where he worked. He quit that job in December 2019. “I wasn’t growing as an artist,” he says. “I wanted to freelance on shoots and editorial assignments, do more than the regular brown-smoky-eye looks.”
Then everything changed. With a whole nation forced indoors by March 2020, assignments were scarce. Dhope was home alone, eating into his savings and wondering what came next for him. In July that year, he decided to strike out on his own and began to post make-up Reels and photos on Instagram (@shantanuuu). He shot in his bedroom, creating on himself some of the more over-the-top looks he’d hoped to try out on clients and models.
Dhope’s Reels range from the simple (a swipe of royal blue eyeliner to set off his moustache, stubble and a blingy ring) to the outrageous (soft-green floral patterns highlight the eyes, and a string of pearls sets off a lime-green dress with matching fairy wings). Working alone from home was the perfect way to dream up ideas and show off his skills, he says. There were no clients to please, no raised eyebrows to confront or ignore, no one to worry about.
“It was 100% easier,” Dhope says. “I didn’t even have the time for social media before, what with 10-hour working days.” Four months in, sponsorships and offers for brand partnership began trickling in. Dhope now has more than 40,000 followers, up from a few hundred in July 2020. Some Reels get more than 30,000 likes and 500 comments, most of them men and women complimenting his brushwork and asking about the products he used.
He still creates the posts alone, but he now has a team to help manage commercial tie-ups.
Dhope’s videos do attract trolls too. “When your content is being exposed to a larger audience, there will be people who don’t agree with what you’re doing,” he says. “It’s mostly because gendering everything, even artistic expression, is ingrained in us. If a boy breaks out of those prescribed norms, people get uncomfortable, and express it as hate.”
He tries not to let this bother him. “I love colour, I love how it transforms a face. For me makeup is an art form,” he says. Hopefully his videos will also help loosen the constrictions of gender, he says.
Looking back over two years of facing the camera rather than a client, Dhope says he’s glad his freelancing plans didn’t work out. “The pandemic brought out everyone’s creative side – we came out as chefs, banana-bread experts. The trick is to find your own identity,” he says. “People on social media can always tell when you’re not being yourself.”
– Rachel Lopez
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Finding happiness in a good list: Veena Parmar
For Veena Parmar, 33, who broke free of a tumultuous long-term relationship in 2019, the pandemic started out in a mild panic, but she’s emerged from it with a 10-point plan for happiness.
Parmar was more at sea than most when the first lockdown was announced in March 2020. “I didn’t even know the word ‘quarantine’,” says the Mumbai-based tech project manager. “I had to Google it.”
She didn’t like what she read. Single, unhappy, with a prickly relationship with her family, her long hours at the office had been a refuge. Now she was working from home, isolated from friends. “All of a sudden, I had an empty plate,” she says. “I would sleep badly and ruin the next day. That first week at home was a nightmare.”
A writer friend suggested Parmar maintain a daily list of 10 things that made her grateful. To stay motivated, the two women would share their list on WhatsApp every day.
At first, Parmar says, she could barely find five things to be happy about. But there were cues in her friend’s lists: A walk in the building compound, salvaging a cooking disaster, zapping mosquitoes. “It showed me how to be grateful for little things.” Her own lists blossomed: A spell of dancing, a card game with her father, a dinner she relished, a restorative shower.
As the pandemic stretched on, so did the list exchange. “It became the thing to do at night – looking back at the day, choosing to list only what pleased me, knowing I was fine,” Parmar says.
The women made an effort to add new things to do, see and appreciate, as the days blended into each other. Parmar became more aware of happy moments as she experienced them, now that she was always looking for new things to list. Even rants were repackaged, as punchlines to laugh over. In an unexpected plus, Parmar found herself speaking up more at virtual office meetings. “Since I’d been articulating my feelings without judgement, it just became easier to communicate,” she says.
The women celebrated a year of listkeeping with a staycation at a luxury hotel last year. Two years on, with most restrictions lifted, they are still sharing their lists every day. “There are enough frustrations in regular life to warrant an end-of-day list,” says Parmar. Her own daily list often stretches to 18 items on a good day, but never falls below 10. New additions include a peaceful commute, a post-lunch walk at her office premises, a peaceful weekend rearranging her workwear wardrobe.
She no longer describes herself as unhappy. “Tomorrow, I think I would be happy even in isolation,” she says. “Because more than anything, this taught me what the word ‘grateful’ really means.”
– Rachel Lopez
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Making and remaking a Silly dream: Karan Nohria
“Regardless of the pandemic, everything you do is a risk, because you’re putting yourself out there. So why not open a restaurant in the middle of a lockdown?” says Karan Nohria.
He was 21 when he opened Silly, a casual all-day hangout in Mumbai, last year. He’d been working on the idea since he was a teen.
“At 18, I didn’t want to travel,” he says. He’d worked at events companies and loved how a well-orchestrated experience made people smile. “I wanted to be a part of that.” By the early weeks of 2020, the virus was already spreading alarmingly. Nohria’s mother, Meenu Nohria, 40, a homemaker, urged him to follow his dream, and helped him fund it with family money. So while urban India waited out the first lockdown in March 2020, Nohria got to work, developing a plan for a restaurant that would act as a stylish sanctuary.
Nohria had opted out of college, and worked in businesses run by the extended family. But he had no hospitality training. Pawan Shahri, Dhawal Udeshi and Nikita Harsinghani, who had set up restaurants and lounges such as London Taxi and Blah! in Mumbai, agreed to help. “I didn’t even know that food costs should not be above 33% of total operating costs,” he says. He spent those early months of the lockdown indoors, doing something he hated: reading up.
The restaurant opened in March 2021. Spread across 4,700 sq ft in suburban Khar are reading nooks, dining areas, a lounge, a cocktail bar, a leafy courtyard designed around a mango tree, and a 34-page menu of food and drink. Nohria named it Silly, “because people keep saying, ‘Karan don’t be silly’. It felt like an extension of me, and a place you can be yourself too.”
Then the second wave of Covid-19 hit, deadly and devastating. New restrictions meant Silly had to shut nine days after it opened, leaving young Nohria with a grown-up challenge: What to do with no diners and a staff of 102?
Established restaurateurs such as AD Singh and Riyaaz Amlani were paying their employees even when the restaurants were not operational. Nohria was determined do the same. “We used the time to tweak the food and ambience based on the early reviews – we’d found an unexpected opportunity for improvement,” Nohria says. The menu was updated to fit large groups better. The acoustics were altered to allow for quiet corners.
Nohria and his co-founders had invested ₹6.5 crore in Silly. He was keen to show his team that he wasn’t “a young rich kid blowing up his parents’ money”. It was a two-way education, he says. “I learnt to be patient, and realise that Silly’s success would not depend on the things for which I’m a stickler — a table setting, for instance — but on trusting people to know their job, and being transparent with them.”
Silly reopened in late 2021. In customer reviews online, it seems to exude the kind of relaxed vibe Nohria was aiming for. “I wouldn’t call it a success yet. And I’m still not prepared for everything life will throw at me,” he says. But the pandemic has made him better prepared.
– Rachel Lopez
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