OUR CRUCIBLE MOMENT - life in the times of covid19

Growing up every summer, when we would visit our grandparents, my brother and I would hear our grandfather narrate his tales from the partition time. He was the eldest son to a father with two wives, many siblings and a large extended family – and relocating the entire “tabbar” from Pindi to Delhi was a responsibility squarely on his shoulders. Even in the final years of his life, when Dementia almost took away all his memory and he would confuse me for my father, these tales still remained ever so deeply etched and got retold at every visit.

My father himself fondly narrates stories of his armed forces days – tales of Emergency, of the 1971 war and of his field postings in Ladakh and Kashmir.

Here is a fact about life - we live it every moment but it is remembered and defined by certain crucible moments. These are those milestone events of our lives which test our values by confronting us with our own versions of “Sophie’s choice”, challenges so unusual that our response to them leads to a discovery of who we really are and what truly matters to us. Once passed, these moments forever live as fables of our lives.  An interesting thing about these crucible moments is that when people talk about them, they often wish in hindsight that they had acted somewhat differently during these moments. As an HR professional, I often hear leaders narrate their crucible moments in leadership workshops and when you ask them what would you wish you had done differently? Their answers could be summed up in this statement – I wish I had acted with greater courage, gratitude and humanity.

As days and weeks roll by and the full impact of COVID is felt in India, times will become more bleak, scary and tough – people tested positive will no longer be someone far away but those in our vicinity, our acquaintance, our rations will deplete, working from home will start annoying us and this curfew will play on our nerves. This is our crucible moment, and one that impacts every walk of our lives - as a family member, as a boss, colleague and a member of the larger civic society. How we respond and react to situations that evolve in the next 3 weeks (or more) will frame our fable of this crucible moment. As a boss, lets be conscious that our subordinates are currently very concerned about the well being of their family, as a fellow citizen while we may store groceries for our families but let’s equally watch-out for poor families around us who have not the resources to buy in bulk or as the essential services like garbage collection weaken, we be patient instead of losing our temper at them. Remember, we are drafting the narrative of not just our crucible moment but someone else’s too, how would we want to appear in their narrative? And even if we were to ignore these narratives, we cannot ignore that this experience will shape the person we will be hereafter forever – what sort of a person would we want to be?

We need to be choice-ful of our responses. In every action, when we have a choice, lets choose the response which requires greater courage, allows us to demonstrate more gratitude and be more human. There is every chance that when we look back at this time in distant future, we will be glad & proud of ourselves to have made that choice.

#stayindoorsstaysafe.

Ankush Punj