Covid – 19 : What will change?

The Covid – 19 situation does provide us two great conclusions to begin with:

• We are Global – The world is more connected than ever. We truly live in a global world and the idea of “think global, act local” should be construed more as “think global, act global”
• Black Swan Events? Think Again – We have all had various instances where economic activity stopped altogether in some part of the world, in some remote area due to some one – off isolated situation be it catastrophes ranging from Tsunami, Katrina or epidemic outbreaks like SARS, mad cow disease etc. but Covid – 19 has to be the one that tops the list – bringing the entire world, the whole of economic activity all to a standstill at once.

Here are a few trends I see changing in the near future:

1. Consumption Basket – Sanitisers and Tissue Papers will increasingly become a part of the Indian household’s consumption basket. Data is the new oil and all of us would be consuming this more than ever.
2. Not yet robots, we are still here – Irrespective of how technology has disrupted multiple things, human beings still form a significant part of the entire value chain – trucks to drive, e-commerce orders to fulfill, food to be made in the kitchen etc.
3. Risk assessment – both in corporate and personal setting will need to have a hard re-look. Clearly, no one saw a Covid – 19 situation coming in, but once this subsists, all risk management strategies, business backup preparedness will need to go for a deep reset.
4. Financial Planning and Personal Wealth – Medical and General Insurance, emergency corpus and financial planning will once again take centre stage in the world of personal wealth. It will obviously also come with a fair share of mis-selling too, but better to be well informed than live in ignorance.
5. Meditation & Mental Health – Days of prolonged lock down will lead to anxiety issues among most of us since we are used to going out either for work, or catching up with friends. Despite having all the new modern tools for communication, we will suddenly feel a deep sense of void. Meditation and Mental Health will once again become a key area of focus for the entire humanity.
6. Patience – Things are going to take longer than usual, that order is not going to show up at your door on the same day, that pizza might take a little more than 30 minutes and that vacation may be delayed by at least 2–3 months. Will it help us assess our patience levels? Or will we get more impatient? Time will tell. Good opportunity to develop patience IMO.
7. Namaste taking over the world? – The world was slowly moving away from hand shakes to fist bumps. Is Namaste going to take over?

You may feel free to add more in the comments section, I have a ton of other thoughts too, these 7 topped the list and made the cut.

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