Short Abstract:

While offering new policy and legislative measures to combat a COVID-19-like pandemic in the future, the book 'Stop Predicting, Revisit life' explores in detail existential issues related to how we perceive life, what it takes to be resilient and how we can work together as a society.

Long Abstract:

Authors Propose Roundtable Panel Discussion on the book: Stop Predicting - Revisit Life: Lessons from Covid 19

https://www.amazon.in/Stop-Predicting-Revisit-Lessons-Covid/dp/9354350925

“The biggest lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic is that let us focus on living our lives, in association with each other in communities, watching each other’s back, holding each other’s hand, and making each other happy. These lessons have been taught to us since our childhood. And we always talk about them, but are we practicing them? Have we learned them?”

Lest we forget, the COVID-19 pandemic which seems like a distant memory now, gave rise to frightening consequences and events that affected every individual across the world and which no one could predict.

It seems that we are prisoners of time. The expression- ‘is it really happening?’ has over a period of time turned into a question of ‘when would it go?’. This journey of pain, anguish and the presence of uncertainty has brought many lessons for us to remember and adopt. Some of us are agitated. Some of us are helpless. Survival takes precedence over everything else. Where does India stand? The answer is not simple. An all-in war is evident but have we taken notes? The learning is being recorded by doctors, scientists, administrators, educationists, soldiers, businesses and farmers but not the common man. Whether we accept it or not there are lessons related to preparedness, living life, related to being together, being optimistic etc.

“Paradoxically the word ‘positive’ has changed its meaning, though it is ironical but true that a word that has always signified the strength of ‘belief’ has itself changed its meaning. Is it sudden that a word having a strength of driving power, may connote fear someday?”

‘Alpha’, ‘Beta’ or ‘Delta’ are not simply mathematical symbols. They are the symbols of COVID- 19 variants, which can turn the society upside down at any moment. COVID- 19 has invaded into our world of understanding.

It is clear that it is an extended war. The most important reconciliation creeping in throughout, whether we acknowledge it or not, is that analysis at any level is eliminating long-term prediction. It’s not that we are losing hope. It’s just that the importance of ‘the present’ has emphasized itself. People have a larger perspective on ‘what would they do’ and ‘how things would be’ after a few years from now, but that is largely associated with a hope that things would be as they were. Certainty with linearity has subdued.

Readers who would read this text in future might agree or might just wonder depending upon the circumstances they would have faced and narrative they would have heard. Predictive perspective might be the reflection of our desire of a self-determined linear growth in favourable times. This book is about describing the circumstances persisting during COVID-19, which has traversed with ease and devastation into 2020, 2021 and probably 2022, with a multangular point of view, while pointing out that whether one likes it or not, one should think of ‘stop predicting and start living’, which may be a call of a lifetime.

This may, by now would have started expressing itself as something which is coming out of an intense, frightful, and stressful experience driven by misery all around. This may also would have started sounding like a sermon which is known to everyone and all of us do turn towards it in times of need and in such moments or era or period, where our limitation does not allow us to meet the challenges easily. We do not know the problems, leave aside the solutions. This book is about how predictive logic and models have been challenged within a very short span of time. It is not remedial and dialectic in approach but resonates a belief and rejuvenates a perspective of life.

The world is so entangled or globalized so to say that aware intelligentsia through their institutions were unable to muster a strength and find a way of buying the words ‘let's stop’. World also has been nurturing hierarchy and all were looking up to someone to say something along with giving a timeline because, that is what we have been doing. We have been ‘predicting’.

The crux is the global community cannot afford to make the same mistake again. Let’s stop predicting and start living – living together.”

‘Stop Predicting, Revisit Life’ is deep discussion on how India fought the war against the COVID-19 pandemic. It offers a 360-degree account of the unprecedented health crisis brought on by pandemic, from reverse migration of millions of workers to the debilitating impact of a lockdown that led to the biggest annual contraction of the Indian economy since 1952. It is based on deep analysis of official data and documents released by the government and international institutions, the debates in Indian Parliament, official reports tabled therein and information collected from the ground during the pandemic.

While offering new policy and legislative measures to combat a COVI-19-like pandemic in the future, Stop Predicting, Revisit life explores in detail existential issues related to how we perceive life, what it takes to be resilient and how we can work together as a society.