Sharing your COVID-19 experiences: Archive of IIT Madras & Heritage Centre

In these struggling times of the global pandemic, the Archive Project of IIT Madras & the IIT Madras Heritage Centre are embarking upon a mission to document the experiences faced by our institute community during the COVID-19 outbreak. Through this initiative, we would like to record the experiences and encounters of the pandemic faced by our faculty, students, scholars, staff, alumni and other members. Though we all go through the same situation, the individual experiences differ from person to person; each will be unique and hence needs to be told and recorded. Therefore, we request you to share your experiences in the form of stories, photographs, videos or any other format that you wish to use.                      

Our lives have completely altered after Covid-19. The recorded evidences are mainly originating from our administration through new rules, regulations, notices and circulars. These records will inform a narrative of the current situation in a certain way. This official record should be augmented with our own personal records and narratives from our everyday living right in the midst of the pandemic; once both these sources are combined, they will provide a much richer understanding of the pandemic situation, not only as a record of the past but also for future generations. The narrative of the Covid-19 pandemic will not be complete until we have stories how we as individuals and communities deal with the situation, and such records will be invaluable to us as well as to future researchers.

The students, researchers, faculty, staff and all the people associated with the campus are now witnessing, experiencing, and living the new normal. The way we used to teach, learn, work and our entire lifestyle has undergone a drastic change. Therefore, documentations of these times will be particularly interesting for us as a community but also for scholars and others when we will look back and want to understand how we have coped with the challenge.

We are interested in knowing your stories of the pandemic. You are free to express your experiences/thoughts/views, here are some ideas that could be addressed in your response: