It’s been three full years since the first news of the Pandemic had started trickling in, in March 2020. The whole of Jan and Feb 2020, we in India had kept on hearing news from China and the Far-East and a bit from the western countries. But we kept on pretending that our 1000-year old way of living and Vitamin D through our sun makes us better than the Joneses. What happened after that is history (hopefully 😊). With 700mn cases, 7mn deaths and 13bn vaccines administered across the globe, we ended up having gone through an unprecedented grey-swan event in these three past years.

I try to recap here some key changes that have happened in our lives ever since, and some upcoming trends. Most of them are relevant for India, but am assuming some or many of them may be true for other countries in the west too :

1. Cross-location office meetings have become Video Meetings, thanks to Zoom, MS-Teams, Google Meet. WebX, Skype etc had been around for 10-15 years before this, but they needed a turbo-kick from Zoom to realise that simple interfaces penetrate rapidly. The audio concall is almost dead, and so is the wired IP-video conferencing. On the non-corporate side, birthday parties among families with members dispersed geographically also have moved to Zoom etc…so have catchup sessions with schoolmates.

Zoom revenue was 330mn USD in 2019 and is going to be 4bn in 2023, a 13x growth, showing that this trend is here to stay. They have 300mn users using daily even now; 89% of the users mentioned they use it for office use; another 63% mentioned that they use it for personal purpose also.

• People have become more aware and more careful of other viruses also – the common cold, flu, etc, and are protecting themselves more from falling prey to such common diseases also. A quarter of people visiting hospitals in Mumbai wear masks now, down from 100% during the Pandemic, but up from zero pre-Pandemic 😊.
• The hybrid way of working – a mix of work-from-office and work-from-home is still around; from my discussions with my senior friends in Big IT industry in India, only about 30-35% employees are back to office completely, another 25-30% come to office 2-3 times a week, and the rest are still working from home completely. However, revenue for the IT sector in India grew from USD194bn in FY21 to USD 227bn in FY22 (targeting USD 245bn in FY23), proving that hybrid working does not negatively impact revenues. The unorganized sector and the mass-market selling sectors are however 100% back to office/factory/shop, giving a perception that all is “back to normal”. You don’t see the people who don’t come to office😊, but looks like, there still are many.
• Payments have gone digital with a vengeance; increasingly more number of people have started using the UPI-based payment systems with PhonePe and GooglePay being the leaders. PayTM gained and lost the single biggest opportunity that any company could have got, being the first mover in this space, but failing to capitalise on this completely. And by the way, this change goes beyond India – developing economies all over the world are catching up with the developed ones in terms of %age of people using digital payment modes.
• OTT explosion also coincided with the Pandemic. Video-on-demand has always been my favourite trend for the past 10-15 years 😊. It took it’s time through the OTT avatar. The luxury of watching what you want, when you want is unparalleled, and I think revolutionary (and now wherever you want too, because of the smartphone). It’s an idea whose time had come and the Pandemic hastened the mass proliferation.
• Over-heating of Tech and startup stocks. The Pandemic induced a sense of “Digitalization Urgency” across the world, and the Tech stocks took off, with a rub off effect on all startups, from mid- 2020 to end 2021. NASDAQ was at 10k in Feb 2020, fell to 7k in March 2020, then started heating for next 18 months to reach 16k by Nov 2021, a 70% increase over pre-Pandemic levels (and of course, a sensational 130% over March 2020 lows). The heating up, as always shot off at the top and fell to 10k again by June 2022, this time over-shooting on the lower side, as always. I think the tech businesses and the startups are here to stay and will rebound in 2023. And NASDAQ to end 2023 around 30-40% above Feb 2020 levels. (BTW, the FANGAM stocks contribute to about 30-35% of NASDAQ’s performance)
• There have been more evolved changes too in people, their attitudes to lives and their way of living in general. Many people have started living it up more, traveling more, ticking off bucket lists and in general increasing the quality of their lives (YOLO and all that). More hobbies are being taken up.

People have started moving to bigger homes after having conducted 2-3 zoom calls from the same room 😊. More younger people (Millennials and Gen Z) have started buying homes instead of renting them, after their Pandemic experiences. 

• Continuing with the more subliminal and more refined changes, more people are turning to their spiritual inner selves than before, trying to find more meaning in their lives. Hopefully, we will end up becoming better human beings, exhibiting higher degree of care, empathy, humility and concern.

What a phase of our lives these three years have been! Am not sure if these measure up to the changes that took place during the Spanish Flu of 1918-20, which may also have been another apocalyptic but incredible phase in our modern history. I have a feeling that people will remember the 2020-2023 phase even hundred years down the line!