Pretty much everyone was happy to usher in 2021. COVID
vaccines were being administered. Electoral college process was progressing.
How can 2021 not be better than 2020?
The happy-ish mood continued on January 4, the first Monday of
the new year. It also happened to be my birthday. Lots of lovely phone calls
and text messages during the day helped fighting the ‘back-to-work-after-the-holidays’
blues. It was the perfect low-key birthday that I wanted, topped off with a socially
distanced surprise visit by our family friends in the evening.
January 5 was OK too. Tuesday tennis in the evening. Georgia
senate election reporting on TV. Everything was 'normal'!
Come January 6. Wednesday. I had a pretty significant zoom meeting
scheduled with the entire engineering and marketing team of my new start-up
client. So I was preparing without the distraction of emails and push alerts on
my phone. But then one of my clients called and said “Can you believe what’s
going on in the Capitol right now?” I had to take a look at CNN, and there went
normalcy down the drain!
We are professionals. So I still conducted the crucial
meeting with my new client team, and we all agreed that it is strangely
comforting to have the impersonal immersion to immediate work on your plate
when insanity happens in the real world and you cannot do anything about it right
at that moment.
January 7 did restore people’s faith in democracy to a large extent, because lawmakers did their job rising above the turmoil. While 2020 caught us off-guard in the beginning, we are all much more resilient in 2021. We had to be--in order to survive. It is now 300 days since the first shelter-in-place order took effect on March 17, 2020. Close to 2 million people have fallen victim to COVID worldwide. Almost 375,000 people passed away in US alone. New strains of COVID have emerged to make us all a little worried about how effective the vaccines would be after all. But we march on. We laugh. We cry. We extend warmth and support to one another in the hope of better days to come.
And who knows, if some miracle happens, then by the time I write again to commemorate the 400
days---I have written to document 100 days, 200 days, and now 300 days---I
might actually be vaccinated. No harm in being an optimist. :-)
