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Launched in 2014, StoryBites is a weekly feature from YourStory, featuring notable quotable quotes in our articles of this past week (see the previous edition here). This special series of compilations focuses on India’s COVID-19 struggle. Share these quotes and excerpts with your networks, and check back to the original articles for more insights.

See also our pick of Top Quotes of 2021 on Entrepreneurship, Investment, Digital Transformation, Storytelling, The India Opportunity, Pandemic Resilience, Failure Recovery, Design, and Art.

Post-COVID-19 consumer’s preference for healthy snacks has considerably increased and there is momentous white space in the category. – Lovkesh Kapoor, Ananta Capital

During the pandemic, everyone was looking at the safety aspect when it came to food. – Ramya Ravi, RNR Donne Biryani

The pandemic increased our need to connect with nature. – Maxim Larrivee, Insectarium

Before the pandemic led to country-wide closure of schools, India and had six million out-of-school children. Now that number has risen to 10 million – particularly among the poorest and most vulnerable. – Kamal Gaur and Ketaki Saksena, Save the Children India

COVID-19 has impacted every sector of the economy, but MSMEs have been particularly hard hit due to supply-side disruption and demand reduction. – Akash Gehani, Instamojo

There are queer folks who lost their livelihoods during the pandemic. They took the entrepreneurial risk and started a creative business. – Ashish Chopra, BeUnic

During Covid, people experimented a lot and started shopping for small, homegrown brands. – Esha Shah, Maisha by Esha

There is a massive growth potential in the unmanned retail space post pandemic. – Rajesh Kumar, NutriTap

One of the most common issues we have witnessed among remote working professionals who have reached out to us is their struggle to unplug from their professional life, leading to burnouts and other concerns. – Sumeet Singh, Enso Innovation Lab

We launched our [early learning] app amid the pandemic as a proof-of-concept and the results were overwhelming. – Prerna Jhunjhunwala, Creative Galileo

The pandemic didn’t affect our operations as we have a hybrid product comprising physical and virtual products. – Sushil Agrawal, Saarthi Pedagogy

With more research, we found out that almost all the tribal artists were in a bad financial situation and were even living in slums. – Dushyant Dangi, Tribal Art India

The most challenging part [during the lockdown] was to continue supporting our artisans as a bootstrapped early-stage business. – Disha Singh, Zouk

I believe digital transformation is the key to our next phase of growth in the post-pandemic operating environment. – Shuji Tanaka, OWNDAYS

Online working and online inductions were as new to companies as to new employees. That made hand-holding difficult, leaving feelings of worthlessness and inadequacy. – Gauri Joshi, Trijog

All schools of India evolved from being offline pre-pandemic and online during pandemic to now being hybrid. – Pallav Pandey, Uolo Technology

With the spread of the internet far and wide into the country, people in smaller cities and towns are exposed to content that builds their aspirations for a certain lifestyle and certain products. Moreover, the pandemic made many people leave the cities to return to these small towns. – Mathew Joseph, Sleepyhead

In spite of the explosion of video content, since the last few years which was accelerated by the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is an utter dearth of business intelligence solutions that leverage this wonderful source of data and help enterprises around the world generate revenue. – Vidhya T. Vinay, Streamingo Solutions

During the pandemic, online dating and virtual flirting became a forced substitute for real-life encounters, providing people a much-sought outlet to vent during the lockdown. – Sybil Shiddell, Gleeden

There has been a change in the mindset among SME entrepreneurs after the pandemic and lockdowns. Most of them have adopted digital thinking. – Winny Patro, Recordent

YourStory has also published the pocketbook ‘Proverbs and Quotes for Entrepreneurs: A World of Inspiration for Startups’ as a creative and motivational guide for innovators (downloadable as apps here: Apple, Android).