EMPATHY IN THE TIMES OF COVID-19

                           EMPATHY IN THE TIMES OF COVID-19

“Empathy” is the ability to understand another person’s feelings, mood or conditions. Its like imagining that we are walking in their shoes and understanding what they must be going through. The famous Opray Winfrey once said and I quote , “ The struggle of my life created empathy, I could relate to pain, being abandoned, having people not love me.” Now, when the world is going through unprecedented times, having attacked by a deadly virus leading to lockdowns and loss of livelihood, empathy is what we need to develop. This time is not only about self isolation, its also about discovering yourself. Discovering that materialistic  pleasures and luxuries were the least essential needs in life. When the lockdown was announced, we rushed to collect basic items to survive, like everyday food items and groceries. How many of us went to a jeweller to buy a fancy item ? How many of us rushed to a famous restaurant to grab a bite of an exotic food? The answer is probably  NO-ONE.  But having said that, our social media posts potray an altogether different picture. Like most celebrities, we upload cooking and work out videos, exotic fruits and vegetables. Some of us very nonchalantly say that we are bored at home and how much we are missing our favourite restaurant and clubs. In a parallel world not so far from ours,  large number of anxious, desperate migrant workers who were rendered homeless and unemployed gathered at the  Anand Vihar bus terminal in Delhi, India on the 28^th march and  at Bandra in Mumbai on 14^th april demanding to reach home. Because they knew that hunger will kill them before the virus will do so. When hundereds of homeless and poor people are crying out for help because they don’t have basic food to eat, when a heart wrenching video of a man in Agra collecting spilled over milk on the road along with some dogs went viral,   should we be flaunting our cheese cakes and pastas with exotic sauce on social media?  Im not saying that we can not flaunt our privileges . Of course we can, but morally we should not. Empathy is the emotion we can show from our homes when we are not able to directly reach out to the needy. Calamities also bring out the character of an individual, they redefine a person. Empathy must be of one the attributes that  this calamity brings out in us. After all, we all co-exist together  in a world no matter how much separated by the boundaries of poor and rich, inferior and superior, educated and uneducated. But what holds us together is that we FEEL . Feel what the other person must be going through. As someone rightly said “If you feel pain in other’s pain, congratulations you are a human being.”