How you cope with sudden unemployment

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Editor's note: As the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic looms over India, your company scrambles to go remote. A skeleton crew mans the office; you and everyone else get your laptops and scoot. For the first few days, you awkwardly settle into a new routine at the dining table. Things don’t seem too bad. Then the lockdown hits, you rush with everyone else to hoard groceries and skim YouTube videos for recipes, cleaning tips and jokes. Your new work from home life gets hectic. Day after day passes, the world and the country caring about little other than the coronavirus numbers. You tire of sitting in your shorts and imbibing a jumble of news, work emails, Zoom calls and social media, even as conversations in the company, the industry and the economy at large turn increasingly worried. The MakeMyTrip group of travel websites announces pay cuts, with the management giving up their salaries entirely; many contractors and third-party staff may be let go of, the reports say. Loss-making hotel aggregator OYO furloughs or lays off thousands of staff across markets and cuts …