Collective trauma and the impact the pandemic has had on Nishtha as a journalist during the second wave of Covid-19 in India.
It sounds like a very contradictory term: collective trauma. When we think about trauma, the mind goes to more individual aspects of a person‘s life: the hardships that they are facing alone, problems that are unique to them - but what does one do when every single person you look at is going through the same thing and yet you're not able to reach out to any of them? At least that’s the way most of this country felt during the very dark period of March 2021 to…who can even say when this period ends?
The second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic brought India quite literally to its knees and while some say that the third wave isn’t that bad and the worst is behind us or even that we as a society have moved on from what we faced back then - have we ever really come to terms with the collective trauma of the second wave? I’m not too sure.
The most commonplace definition of the term collective trauma is a collective memory of an awful event that happened to that group of people. And it was a truly terrible memory - but the eternal optimist can argue that after a very long time, a community came together like never before. Strangers putting in their heart and soul to help someone they had never met or known beyond a request on social media, or a phone number even.
For a little context into who I am, I work in media and as a journalist - after a certain point, trauma blurs and you train yourself to toughen up against the tragedies we cover. If we start falling apart at every piece of bad news that we cover, it would be tough to continue in the profession. But as a person - the second wave took a toll on my mental health like nothing else has. Covering the second wave was relentless and with no breaks. Images and stories from the second wave shook even the most hardened of journalists who have spent years making their hearts and minds immune to the brutalities of the world.
Researchers say there’s no way to gauge how much of a toll the pandemic will take on us in the long run, which isn’t surprising given how much anxiety and unease this period of uncertainty brought to everyone. With any humanitarian tragedy that occurs there are always stories of bright lights and moments of solidarity - but as a citizen what befuddles the mind the most is how short our memory span is. As the nation stood on the brink of a third wave, we saw crowds and rallies of various political parties that were very reminiscent of the polls before the brink of the second wave. Is this just a lapse in memory or denial?
One can only wonder.
Nishtha is a multimedia journalist who specialises in visual storytelling.
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