The past two years have seen many new words added to our daily lives such as the pandemic, quarantine, self isolation, lockdown and social distancing.

Amongst all these terms that have become part of our daily routine, the one that I find has had a big impact on our way of living is social distancing, this is applicable not just in India, it is practised all over the world.

India is the second most populous country in the world and more than half of its population below to the under 35 years age group, that means in a country of more than a billion people, about 500 million people belong to the youth category.

In a country where cities are overcrowded, housing is expensive with people find it difficult to own or rent a house, travel by public transport such as trains and buses is a daily struggle as they are jam packed or they are not on time and it is extremely difficult for hundreds of people to stand in line in the hot and humid weather just to enter a grocery shop or a shopping mall with restrictions on the number of people who are allowed to enter and the number of hours that these businesses are open to the public.

According to experts, man needs to be social and it is a part of our nature to belong to a group and connect with other people, social distancing does the exact opposite because we are asking people to keep their distance from others.

There is no doubt that the social distancing was done for a good reason that is to stop the spread of the COVID 19 virus but from personal experience I have observed that it has been a challenging situation due to the difficulty in convincing people to keep a distance from each other.

It is unfortunate that social media is being used to spread rumours, fake news and misinformation about the pandemic, as a result people were in a panic, they started storing household products and ignored all the rules that are essential for social distancing.

Social distancing has led to growth feelings of isolation and depression especially in children because they get easily frustrated when they are unable to get out of the house. It has a negative effect on their health because they spend long hours in front of the screen and there is minimal physical activity.

The older generation have also been affected by social distancing because they are not tech savvy like today's generation and believe in physical interaction and are not comfortable with being online and using online technology to get things done.

We can also find the side effects of social distancing on the economy throughout the world, many people have lost their jobs, businesses have shutdown and migrants have returned back to their place of origin.

Overall, social distancing is not a failure but it has achieved mixed results, it has worked in some ways because it has brought down the spread of the virus but at the same time it has led to unintended consequences that has changed our way of doing things and how we go about our daily lives.