WISDOM FOR THE FUTURE

Four special Bazaar India contributors pen exclusive essays on how to navigate an uncertain tomorrow with courage and conviction, to embrace one’s inner strength and beauty.

- Radhika Bhalla

“It’s worth cherishing the small things that delight until the clouds lift...”

Shobhaa De, on Navigating Relationships, with Others and Ourselves Best-selling author of 20 books and widely-read columnist

Covid has been playing mind games with the world and causing annoying disconnects in our lives. Collateral damage comes in the form of fractured relationships—at home, at the workplace, even across vast distances. My daughter Anandita was fortunate—she found her solace in a tiny ball of apricot-colored fur—an adorable and impossibly pretty miniature poodle called Bijou. I am still searching for my lucky charm. I only wish we had acquired Bijou earlier, at a time when stress levels were seriously threatening the peace in our home. The peace we had taken for granted over years of close but relatively independent proximity. For most families, the dreaded Covid turmoil or Covid angst seriously disrupted the delicate balance of the emotional scales we call daily life.

Anandita said in passing, “Mama, I think Ovid has brought the world together...”. I absently agreed—in theory, it made sense. But has it, really? Relationships have taken the biggest hit, and the real crisis facing all of us is a mental health pandemic and not a deadly virus. Around me, I observe emotional debris as solidly-built relationships collapse in untidy heaps. The unlikeliest of couples are filing for divorce, while statistics for global clinical depression are impossible to tabulate. The numbers have overwhelmed sociologists/psychologists as much as those dealing with abject feelings of self-loathing and wretchedness.