Monday Blues (On a Tuesday)

Spoiler alert: This is going to be about COVID -19. I am not going to give free advice about quarantine and basic hygiene. Instead, this is going to be about life during these times and post these things end.

A little background, last year exactly during these months, my wife and I used to travel from Greater Noida to Gurgaon on daily basis due to her office in Gurgaon. We use to spend on an average 4 hours daily on road. That would mean passing through 4 cities and 2 states with 130 plus Km on daily basis!

Later, we decided to shift to Gurgaon and things started to get sorted. We had a distant dream that what if we can WORK FROM HOME.

Come 2020, here we are working from home. Dreams do come true. We feel lazier, more comfortable. We have setup our respective workstations as per our convenience. Initial first few days of working from home were almost exciting. Then this was followed up by back pain, leg soreness and a very weird cracking noise from neck. Then it was later followed up by mood swings, food cravings, and even urges to go to office floor on a Monday!

Now some serious stuff, everyone is scared about their economic and health well being. Since this is a disease which does not show any symptom for almost a week, being quarantined is the best thing you can do to yourself. Even a vaccine comes out right now magically (developed, researched, tested in various permutations) right at this very moment I am writing this article; it will take at least few months to reach everywhere. The vaccine may or may not work for everyone. Remember, people used to get polio even after vaccination.  

The daily wage workers and lower income group of people have already started migrating to their hometown. All public transportation is closed. This means they will resort to other means of transport to travel through the country. With very limited resources, a lot of them will not survive.

History of epidemics and pandemics has always been horrible. People die across planet due to diseases all the time. But such high infestation of a viral disease causes a complete change in economic activities.

I wonder how many restaurants, cruise liners, airlines, hotels and small retailers will survive this year. A lot of people will go under debt (or have already). Stock markets are going crazy, so is oil market and currency market.

Then there are businesses which are capital intensive, they would feel the heat. That heat would be passed on other ancillary businesses.

On top of this, various media houses have been giving up the news that China has upped their investment game in countries of interest. They are investing in businesses aggressively (example HDFC), when markets are cheap. I won’t be surprised, if a lot of companies would be owned by Chinese domicile in the next decade.

I wonder what would happen to real estate market, if this pandemic lasts longer. Since migrants have gone back to home town, there would be a huge gap in demand and supply. Real estate markets of cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Noida, Gurgaon, Pune, Kochi  etc thrive on migrant workers to a large extent. There would be huge gap in demand and supply. These cities are mostly populated with IT and outsourcing industry people; most of these IT and outsourcing companies have already understood that most of the tasks can be done from home.

The back office and project work can always be done from home, if the work force is self sufficient.  Few companies might even offer work from home as an incentive for their highly rated employees with four or five visits a month to make sure employee is retained. People with such skill set would start living places where connectivity is good and cost of living is less. That would mean all those cities I mentioned above would enter into some sort of recession. That would result in to lesser crowd in malls that in turn would result in lesser footfall. Lesser footfall would further result in fewer sales, less sales would result in less profit. And as we know, less profit is always not good for any business.

People who are dependent on rental incomes would be impacted on large scale. They would need to pick up a new skill set to survive in long run.

There are few other things I observed in last couple of weeks. The sky is clearer, air is fresher, and summer heat is not as scorching as it used to be (or may be because I am not stepping out of house). Rivers and other water bodies are cleaner, animals are definitely happier since there is no human intervention. 

With two more weeks in quarantine on the way, I would definitely have even dozen more thoughts about everything.