Wake up to the calling

The former prime minister of United Kingdom, Winston Churchill is often been credited to have said that,

      “Never let a good crisis go to waste”

 He said it in the mid-1940s, it was the time when we were approaching the end of World War II. The scrutinization made by him during the bleakest day of that dreadful pages of history has a lot to teach us today when we are fighting against this global pandemic.Adversities give so many opportunities to create new ventures. Crisis indeed comes with a lot of challenges and these challenges demand themselves to be converted into opportunities. So whenever there is a crisis, we should look at what we can do to get out of it instead of getting depressed and taking the backseat.

                    

                                

Today is the greatest crisis that humankind is facing in recorded history. This kind of crisis has never been there. In these tough times, there is a growing inequality that is making society untenable. COVID 19 has not only severely impacted global health but also has paralyzed mankind economically, socially, and psychologically.Moreover, nature is overburdened. The biosphere can no longer take the load of whatever we are throwing at it and climate is threatening our very own existence.

                                          

However, it is seen that whenever there is an existential crisis people tend to become more creative. It is the crisis or problems that drove individuals to become more creative and innovate new solutions. Eventually, these solutions come to society and become part of our daily life. The majority of the technology we are proud of be it communication, construction, entertainment, aviation, transportation all of them emerges from problems or crises.

                                              

Our present situation is the testimony to this fact. Many companies are coming out with drugs to combat the deadly coronavirus that normally takes 2 to 5 years or even more. And this process is being accelerated to 4 to 5 months. Earlier it used to take billions of dollars to come out with new molecules to treat a particular disease and now it is being done with lesser input, lesser time, and even testing is going on at a great pace.

                                          

 Another exemplary instance is when we faced the challenge of the non-availability of personal protective equipment and were failing to meet the its qualitative and quantitive requirements.At that time we decided to do it indigenously and now India is the second-largest manufacturer of PPE body coveralls and the point to be underlined here is that this all happened within a short period of three months. It is symbolizing that this crisis has thrown a lot of opportunities and has made people more creative, Isn't it?               

                                                                                       

 

We Indians had always been the creators in ancient times. If we consider the facts Indian GDP was 22.6% of global GDP in 1700. As the painstaking statistical work of Cambridge historian Angus Maddison has shown, India's share of world income collapsed from 22.6% in 1700 to as low as 3.8% in 1952. To put this in a simpler word it has been stated that “At the beginning of 20th Century, the brightest jewel in the British crown became one of the poorest countries in the world”.

                                                  

But what went wrong? The simpler answer to this question is that we Indians lost our entrepreneur zeal and became risk-averse.Britishers wanted neither to promote Indian businesses nor the entrepreneurship rather they were interested to create laborers who would act as their puppets. Moreover, we became victims to many myths that hindered our performance emotionally, economically, and socially.

                                                     

If we put on our economical lenses and look at the worth of money in a global context, we will find that our rupee has lost its value depreciatingly. A  dollar can be bought by 75 rupees today that implies that money value is 75 to a dollar. This value was 45.19 and 12.38 to a dollar in 2006 and 1985 respectively. When we bring a dollar through export the demand for rupee increases and its value goes up.Suppose you have 75000 rupees in the bank which implies that you have around 1000 dollars.For instance, the value of money appreciates to 7.5 to a dollar. Now you have 10,000 dollars in your account without doing anything.Hence the conclusion that can be drawn is that we need to bring in foreign exchange so that the value of rupee appreciates in the turn. 

                                     

These are testing times that require every section of society to rise to the challenge. The job market is changing so fast. We need more startups, more entrepreneurs,more youth coming out with ideas and solutions to boost the economy and uplift the lives of fellow beings. We need job creators. We have the market since India is full of consumers. We have a large young population. Thousands of professionals are churning out every year. We are rich in resources and government policies have become more valuable and favourable than ever. 

                       

We are the world’s largest producer of pharmaceutics.We are playing a huge role in the technological domain. There is every reason to believe that we can achieve what we want. COVID 19 has sent us into quarantine but demands us not to quarantine our ideas and visions. We need to take the plunge in the sea of challenges that it has thrown at us and convert them into opportunities.

                     

                     

But the hardest thing is to get started. So start working from now itself. Unless you start you will never know what you are capable of. So start, only then you will be able to know that you can do And unless you start, people will never tell you that you can do. And with that positive note here comes the last question:

 Do you want your ideas to be converted into reality or just like other pipe dreams?