REMOTE CONTROL

As India is forced to experiment with what has been long believed to be the future of work—so far only in theory—can working from home really become the new normal?

- PANKTI MEHTA KADAKIA AND NAANDIKA TRIPATHI

SONALI THAPAR,

DIRECTOR, TCAP INVESTMENTS

“We are doing regular phone calls, webinars and Zoom sessions, but since ours is a business with a corpus of money involved, neither party is comfortable exchanging hands without a face-to-face interaction.”

When ‘Where should we go for dinner?’ has been swiftly replaced with ‘Zoom, Google Meet or House Party?’, it isn’t surprising that Bengaluru-based Arjun Mehra has to log on to a video conference app to collaborate with his colleagues. What’s unusual, though, is the nature of his work: Mehra, a content writer by day, moonlights as an improv comic. His troupe typically performs one or two live shows a week, and, like the rest of the world, is grappling with how to ‘work from home’ during the Covid-19 lockdown.

“We’re live entertainers and we do improv [or improvised] theatre, which you obviously need to perform on a stage, in front of an audience—or so we thought,” says Mehra. “For a lot of us, theatre isn’t our primary source of income, but with shows a couple of times a week, it is additional revenue. But even besides that, we wanted to find ways to continue practising, putting out our acts. With the lockdown, we had to stop all rehearsals and workshops. But very quickly, we saw that a lot of the improv community around the world had gravitated towards doing things online.”