My first blog of 2021 on the first day of 2021 is not purely incidental but very intentional. I have heard people say what you do on the first day of a new year tends to become the trend and sets the tone for the rest of the year. I definitely want to write this year and a lot more from what I did in 2020.

2021 has just started and people around the world already have a lot of expectations from it. If 2021 was a person, I imagine her to be someone who is standing on this big stage all alone with audiences staring at her that want nothing less than an Oscar worthy performance. 2020 being the year that it was, I am also looking at 2021 to give us that knocking performance. Will it be able to live up to those expectations? We will all find it out together.

While 2020 will go down in history as the year when people around the world lost quite a lot and it would always be synonymous with the word ‘Pandemic’, I personally cannot help but also remember it as the year that was very honest.

The first half of 2020 the world had started to reel with the sufferings caused by Covid. People losing their loved ones, their jobs, their businesses, people struggling to find ways to keep themselves afloat mentally, physically, emotionally and financially. Amidst all this chaos and suffering, I remember smiling when I saw the sheer resilience of our health care workers being the superheroes in scrubs, when I saw our teachers so patiently going the digital way to keep up the momentum of education for our children, when I watched stories about thriving wildlife in different places all over the world due to no interference from our human race and also when I heard about Delhi(my home) getting a fresh breath of much cleaner air in a decade I believe(thanks to a very strict lockdown leading to no pollution). 2020 gave me time to pause quite literally, to think, to reinvent things about myself, to make endless amount of memories with my family without having to plan about things we otherwise planned in advance owing to our hectic schedules.

I am not sure how many will agree with what you are going to read but here you go. While some of us will forget all that we have seen in 2020 in years to come, some of us would never be able to forget because of their respective losses. There would also be some like me who would remember 2020 for the things it played out blatantly and also for those things it wasn’t trying to teach us on purpose. How to treat little things as luxuries and take absolutely nothing for granted – the luxury to make a run to the groceries any time you feel like without worrying about the number of people you will find there, the luxury to go to your neighbourhood park with your kids, the luxury to go to your office and interact with people at work and the luxury to just hug someone without any hesitation. So when I say 2020 has been an honest year, it means it has shown me the simple realities that existed all along but their importance never got registered in my mind until they were taken away from me.

With that said, I aim to carry these learnings with me for as long as I am here and wish for 2021 to truly be the year when hope wins over misery. Happy New Year!