Collectivism during COVID?

 

As an international student from India, I was already planning to go back home to Delhi for Spring Break, during March 2020. However, due to a lockdown being imposed in India and COVID spreading far and wide, I did not have the option to come back to our beloved campus or community of Isla Vista. With a strict implementation of a country-wide lockdown imposed in India, I couldn’t see my closest family members and relatives, a travesty when you hail from a collectivistic society, where it is not only an obligation, but also an acute joy for me to visit my grandparents, cousins, and relatives when I go back home. Still, with my parents having to be constrained to our home, lacking the same love for Netflix that millennials and Gen-Z do, they were frustrated. They didn’t know what to do, ultimately leading to exponentially growing and spreading frustration within my family. 

Battling a happy family life while being forced to spend every second with each other for months, I tried my best to not only study for classes with a day-night time difference, but also maintain all those precious friendships I had forged through my 1.5 years at UCSB. With almost all conversation revolving around COVID, I realized that everyone had their own opinion about COVID and how to handle it, specifically since little research was available during the initial stages of its spread. 

My family, particularly my parents, were of the view that one’s life should not be restricted due to such a disease. Most of their concerns being economical, their point of view was that a lockdown in India would do more harm than good, due to the immense impact it would have on the economy, and ultimately, various businesses and the poor population that depended on their daily wages. I couldn’t help but agree with this. Moreover, with India being such a collectivist society, thoughts and opinions of society matter a lot more than they do in Western societies. So, stigma around COVID spread far and wide, something most Indian families fear. No one wanted anyone to know if they had been exposed to coronavirus, or if they had already gotten it. On a completely different spectrum, most of my friends in the United States, being staunch supporters of staying at home, argued that if everyone would just stay at home, the need for lockdowns would diminish significantly and COVID would be gone. I couldn’t fault the logic completely here either. 

I was confused. What was the solution? Both answers made sense in their own right. That was one of the first times I really had to acknowledge the significance of not only the difference in cultural values, but economic standing, in determining how important COVID is. In India, COVID didn’t seem all that threatening, where poverty and starvation run rampant, whereas in the United States, it seemed all too life-consuming and altering. Moreover, this was the first time I realized how difficult it was to understand both sides, but not completely agree with either. I was arguing with both my family and friends, using arguments made by friends with my family and vice versa. The pandemic taught me a lot about how cultural values and privileges can impact our view of something, that is technically attacking the world at equal ferocity, yet hurting some more than others.