Commitment Stories 2020 : The Year of Resilience

Recently Collin’s Dictionary chose ‘lockdown’ as the word of the year 2020. Meanwhile, Merriam-Webster went with ‘pandemic’ and the Oxford English Dictionary issued a 38-page report with all the new terms born out of the ‘coronavirus’ era like ‘doom scrolling’ and ‘social distancing’. However, if a single word could sum up this year it would be none other than ‘Resilience’.

Resilience is an often-heard term, yet none of us anticipated how resilient we would have to be in 2020. COVID-19 upended the map of unavoidable turns and turmoil that we might have been expecting this year. For some 2020 was the year of traveling or achieving goals, but the pandemic turned our lives upside down.

However, humankind showed great resilience in the face of this challenge. All of us adapted to the new normal of wearing masks, working from home and taking care of loved ones. It has been a challenging year for many of us, and yet we have all been able to sail through.

At Cadila Pharmaceuticals, we had a unique year as well. We felt worried. We felt hopeful. But above all, we felt proud to have been able to step up in the times of need. Our Care Heroes led the way with donation drives and medical camps. To adopt to new consumer beliefs and habits in the new normal, the year 2020 saw us develop a ‘phygital’ model. Our Young Leaders were the first batch to experience this. Inspired by our founder chairman Shri I A Modi’s values, we at Cadila, continued to work towards bringing quality and affordable healthcare to the last man of the society, through our various products like Sepsivac, Cadalimab and Polycap.

Being part of essential services came with its own set of challenges but things seemed a bit brighter with supportive work friends. We realized that an empathetic, digitalized, diverse and a value driven culture is the key to success in an organization. In fact, all the ‘socially distant’ activities in the new normal bound each one of us closer together in a common cause.

In a deeper sense, the year 2020, brought together billions of people through the shared experience of resilience. Although ‘resilience’ is often defined as navigating or simply getting through challenges, the key part of resilience is not about bouncing back, but it is about bouncing forward. Resilience is the quality that was summoned in us by all the challenges of 2020. And it’s that quality that’s going to carry us forward into 2021.

Wishing all our readers a very Happy and Safe New Year! May we summon and strengthen our resilience, and bounce forward into a new and better year.