As December 31 approaches, the picture of this horrible year begins to firm upAt some point around July I found myself thinking ‘The future is switched off; 2020 is the year the future was switched off.’ When I said this to friends they agreed, ‘Switched off is correct. Chopped off might be better.’Across four short months we had all got used to not speaking about the future as if it was tangible. The next anything really, except in the extreme short term, had become an absurd concept, like speaking of unicorns. And yet, you could argue that for many of India’s labourers in the informal sector the future was switched off not in March 2020 but in November 2016 when the craziness of demonetisation was visited upon the economy. At times this year, the future may have looked as though it was switched off, but perhaps it was only the beginning of regular load-shedding.

Source: The Hindu December 25, 2020 09:24 UTC