As 2020 enters the very last week, a sigh of relief seems audible to see the end of what has been a truly Annus Horribilis. The year started off much the usual but, as PG Wodehouse might put it, fate was just waiting with a cosh, in the form of the Covid-19. Nobody expected an invisible virus starting off innocuously in a Chinese city to wreak the havoc it did worldwide. As it swiftly spread across the globe, even the most advanced nations were left gasping; some are still not breathing easy. With nearly 80 million positive cases worldwide, 1.6 million deaths, some 600 million jobs lost, cities and towns locked down, most economies have contracted.

Not that we have not seen bad years. Just for India, 1947, with the Partition pangs; 1975, the year of Emergency; or 1991, when we came very close to sovereign default, readily spring to mind. But the scale and rapidity of the spread of Covid that caught the health system almost everywhere unprepared made the problem bewildering.

As much as humans have the knack to land in trouble, they also have the ability to recover and move on. The pharma industry racing to develop a vaccine in a matter of months and that several candidates are in late-stage trials is in itself a tribute to the ingenuity of man. We have recovered from the many setbacks, and we will from the Covid, too.

Indeed, India seems to have not done too badly in tackling Covid, especially considering its population. With over 10 million cases, fatalities have been limited to around 1.5 lakhs thanks to the firm lockdown that gave the health-care system the crucial time to prepare itself. And, with Unlock, the animal spirits are coming back into the economy and we may actually have done much better than most developed economies.

Along the way, we have unlearnt many things and learnt new ways to work and do business. The digital revolution is here to stay. Tier 2/3 towns villages are transacting blithely online. Netflix, Prime, Hotstar… have become entertainment destinations in villages, too. ‘Work from Anywhere’ has changed the idea of employee engagement. In many more such ways, 2020 has redeemed itself. And, hopefully, 2021 will do one better

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