Future Shock, Courtesy Covid-19

While the current coronavirus pandemic may have rekindled interest in dystopian movies related to virus outbreaks such as Pandemic and Contagion, thanks to Netflix and Amazon Prime, the society seems to be moving towards what Alvin Toffler had envisaged in his books Future Shock and Third Wave.

During my college days in the late 1980s I used to see these two books in every other book shop and with pavement sellers, but somehow futurism and science fiction were not my cup of tea, so I stayed away. From the random reading of reviews, I got to know that the books apparently talk of an information society and the rapid changes that will happen in the 'super-industrial' society, where technologies getting outdated in a short span of time will be a routine affair.

Toffler's famous quote - “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn,” began figuring in the 'Thought for today' sections of newspaper and magazines. Third Wave talks of the concept of telecommute and home becoming an office space, thanks to computer science.

Back then growing up in a tier-2 city all this sounded too much of a futuristic mumbo jumbo. The offices were still marching to the clickety-clack of the typewriters and employees had to sit neck-deep in a sea of paper and files. Electronic typewriters were seen with the same awe as present day i-Phone launches.

Talking of phones, they were of wired variety with an unwieldy dialler and a handset that used to rest on it. Its penetration was also minimal and getting a phone connection used to be like winning a lottery. Many used to mark PP along with their phone numbers, which meant Private Party or the nearest contact number, but not self-owned. The chances of getting that person on the line largely depended on the mood of the phone's owner.

Computers were seen only in science magazines and Hollywood films. Computer institutes like NIIT were in their early days of extending their footprint across the country. Those in the middle or fag end of their careers saw computers as an evil that will gobble up jobs.

Later the mobile phone-internet duo brought about tectonic shifts in how we work, communicate and every other facet of our lives. Toffler's prophecy looked plausible but it remained more of an exception than a rule. Only those doing freelance gigs worked from home on a permanent basis, but for others it was most often a consolation prize provided by the manager after rejecting the leave. Many bosses looked at work from home with suspicion and companies even had a monthly cap on it.

Covid-19 and the world's biggest lockdown in India changed it all. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but cruel necessity leaves you with a Hobson's choice. Everybody had to willy-nilly work from home. Managers who had so far looked down upon this practice as the first refuge of slackers were forced to list out its virtues. Even industries such as banks, insurance, newspaper publishing, who had never experimented with this practice, were forced into a sink or swim situation - often with mixed results.

Webinars, Zoom meetings, Slack messenger were the new trappings as the work shifted from office to 1 and 2 BHKs of employees, with dining or study table doubling up as home office.

 The early days were heady - no office commute, no need to worry about what to wear for office or whether it has been washed and ironed, shaving became optional, no last minute panic stricken checking of office bag before leaving home for mobile phone and laptop chargers, access cards, pedestal keys and spectacles.

Then the warts started becoming visible - back and neck pains started popping up as the home chairs were no substitute for ergonomically superior office chairs. Many had to make do with pain balms and pain killers as the lockdown ensured that no furniture shops were open, thereby ruling out the possibility of a better chair.


Clearing small doubts and quick questions that just needed a shout out to the colleague at the next pod, now requires laborious scribbling of messages and waiting for a response, which quite often comes with a time lag.

The country's perennial problem of erratic power supply rears its head time and again and sometimes the outages are so long drawn that even the power back-up gives up. 

Another bugbear is the patchy internet. With almost everyone working from home and students taking online classes, internet speed often winds down to a crawl. One needs to be mindful that the number of tabs open do not exceed 10. Otherwise the system hangs at crucial moments like when you are about to click the 'send' button of an important email or during those important calls.

Earlier, leaving for office and the commute back to home, however harrowing, marked a kind of dividing line between work and home. But now that line has blurred. One has to be mindful of the number of pressure cooker whistles while attend a Zoom call and those unwelcome tinkling of door bell while making an online presentation.

Now Google wants its employees to work from home for rest of the year and Twitter wants them to work from home forever! So it looks like this accidental global experiment, forced upon us by an invisible virus, and its serendipitous findings are here to stay. And it is too enticing a template for companies to cut office overhead costs.

In short, we are trying to build up a generation of employees who will see their colleagues through Zoom video, who will never see the insides of an office - the cafeteria banter, the office politics and the corner office intrigue, the raucous bullies, office romance and the associated gossip, visits to nearby shacks for chai-sutta... the list goes on. A really scary prospect!

However, all the waxing eloquent about the virtues of work from home cannot hide the fact that it is at best a privilege that only a section of white collar employees can enjoy. There is a vast segment out there where this mode won't be feasible - those employed in hospitals, police stations, fire stations, factories, transport, hotels, airlines, power plants, oil refineries, farms and many other sectors. They have no choice but to step out of their houses and contend with the risk of contracting the dreaded virus.

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