‘Being stuck in the house led to an inner exploration’ – 15 quotes from India’s pandemic struggle

Launched in 2014, StoryBites is a weekly feature from YourStory, featuring notable quotable quotes in our articles of this past week (see the previous edition here). This special series of compilations focuses on India’s COVID-19 struggle. Share these quotes and excerpts with your networks, and check back to the original articles for more insights.

See also our pick of Top Quotes of 2021 on Entrepreneurship, Investment, Digital Transformation, Storytelling, The India Opportunity, Pandemic Resilience, Failure Recovery, Design, and Art.

With pandemic-induced interruption in work-life balance, there is a greater need for wellness and benefit programmes that enable employees to take care of both their personal and professional commitments. - Ashish Kumar Singh, Meesho

The pandemic has posed an inevitable threat to livelihoods of self-employed women in rural boundaries. - Vivek Tiwari, SATYA MicroCapital

The fact that total loans disbursed to MSMEs have increased by nearly 50 percent compared to pre-pandemic levels is a clear indication that the lending community is actively supporting the resilience and regrowth of this sector. - Navin Chandani, CRIF High Mark

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Tech adoption is increasing rapidly in the Indian logistics industry and digitally-driven logistics services are the need of the hour in the current post-pandemic India. - Karan Shaha, Vahak

For traditional brands, COVID-19 has accelerated their strategy to generate a higher percentage of orders from their own dotcoms. - Amitava Saha, Xpressbees

The reliance on web-based and mobile-based delivery services became critical during the pandemic. - Brett King, Moven

Consumers were now getting tested for the first time at home. - Dheeraj Jain, Redcliffe Labs

What happened during COVID-19 affected us. We worked constantly for the community, but we lost our office and are now working from my home. - Sadam Hanjabam, Ya_All

With COVID-19, physical markets were hardly functioning. Due to the market scenario, we had to get rid of our stock at a heavily discounted price to avoid expiry. - Satish Negi, CRAVOVA

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[Year in Review 2021] How women entrepreneurs pivoted during the pandemic and saw tangible results

Once the lockdown opened up in July 2020, we had orders, but we had no people to manufacture as most labourers had gone back and the production went down due to manpower shortage. - Soumyadeep Mukherjee, Spice Story

As we embraced new ways of working, we looked to the open-source way of doing business, where the best ideas can come from anywhere, and where transparency and collaboration are vital. - Marjet Andriesse, Red Hat

During the pandemic, the traffic of clients increased by 10 to 20 times. In these cases, we could not use traditional cloud solutions. - Chandrakant Agrawal, AppSquadz

For the past two years, the pandemic adversely affected artists. But the artist community has shown resilience, and audiences are showing their support by attending exhibitions. - Krishna Setty CS

Music keeps us together despite our different interests and everything. Living in different cities, we get together a few days before a gig or, rehearse online. It’s funny how people never understood that concept before the pandemic, but now everyone is doing it. – Mercy Tetseo

Being stuck in the house led to an inner exploration. That further led to venturing into different styles and mediums of art. - Jyoti C Singh Deo

YourStory has also published the pocketbook ‘Proverbs and Quotes for Entrepreneurs: A World of Inspiration for Startups’ as a creative and motivational guide for innovators (downloadable as apps here: Apple, Android).

(This copy was updated to correct a typo)