I’ll get to the “weird” title of this post soon.
Over at The Paper, which Suprio Guha Thakurta and I have been writing for two months now, one of our ongoing themes (in the context of the pandemic) is that “people will continue to do the same things, but do them in a different way”. We have corollaries to this and all that.
Here is one corollary that is suited more for this blog than it is to The Paper. Basically, when people do things in a different way, they do more of and less of certain smaller things, and this more and less balance out (that explains the title). OK I don’t think you would have understood any of that so let me clarify with some examples.
People are going to commute less (more working from home, less going out and all that), but when they commute, they are far more likely to use cars than using public transport. So the amount of traffic on the road remains a constant.
There will be far fewer “casual restaurant visits”, so when people want to go out to eat, they want to make sure it counts. So they go to really nice places. The “mass luxury” mid-tier places might lose out.
There will be fewer guests at weddings, since in some places the law mandates that now, and people won’t want to go to very crowded events. However, since the number of guests is going to be smaller, people can afford more lavish weddings “per guest”. So they’ll book fancier (if smaller) halls than they would earlier. Fancier (if fewer) meals. Put up guests in hotels rather than in crowded choultries.
In all this there will be winners and losers. The wedding caterer who charges per guest is a loser. The guy supplying the more fancy stuff (or the hotel guy) might be the winner. The large wedding hall guy is a loser. The fancy small hall guy is a winner.
And so on and so forth.
So this post was triggered by two things I saw during a walk yesterday. I first passed by a small-ish (but nice) hall that used to be used for small functions back in the day. It was hosting a wedding yesterday, and the few people who were there seemed rather well dressed up. Far better dressed than people dress for weddings in Bangalore.
Two minutes later, I paused while crossing the road to make way for a bus, and started thinking about when the next time would be when I would take public transport. And then decided to write this.