The Lockdown
When the microscopic rider rode into town, scythe at the ready, all a trembling humanity could do was to retire to its safest refuge. In nation after nation, lights went out on public life. In the US, as if in a grim nod to history, the most popular exhortation of the day was waved from an aircraft not far removed in vintage from 1918-20, when the Covid pandemic’s true forebear scorched the world. In Mumbai, the Chhatrapati Shivaji train terminus presented a face never seen before: platforms destitute of travelers lay gleaming and silent. As Corona cases spiralled, hospitals dealing with the healing became hives of specialised care—like this one in Calcutta, its tiered luminescence holding out hope for the stricken within, amidst thickening darkness. ‘PPE kits’ and ‘thermometer guns’ were among many words that rudely impinged into our vocabulary.
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Healthworkers hermetically sealed in take samples at a testing centre, while a passing boy stands in for the subject of a mural displaying the gun’s finger-on-the-trigger, efficacious use. The lockdown presented the spectre of unemployment, dispossession and eviction to millions of migrant workers in India. With no social safety net, there began an exodus—a straggling, unending stream began homeward journeys in the searing heat. Their right to survive, it seemed, had been revoked by an eyeless state.
A schoolteacher who lost her job—like millions of people because of the pandemic-linked financial crisis—pleads with an official at a demonstration seeking alternative employment in Agartala.
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The toll so far...
Numbers are random, lifeless and boring, but for the context. Take, for instance, those records from sepia-tinted typewritten documents of the World Wars or from the Spanish Flu a century ago. Or, the real-time update of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, chronicling the ebb and flow of the coronavirus infection. The first case in India was reported on January 30, while the total count was 70 when a national lockdown was clamped down to stop Covid’s spread on March 26. It peaked with 96,424 cases on September 17 and by December 26, the curve came down to 18,732 active infections. What about a panoptic view, the bigger picture? In nine months, India recorded 10.2 million cases, 9.81 million recovered and 148,000 people died of Covid. Across the world: 81.2 million got infected, 45.9 million got well, 1.77 million died. There would be more—unaccounted, no mourner, no epitaph….
Delhi Riots February 23-29
53 Deaths
200+ Wounded
Farmer Protest
The protest in Delhi against three new farm laws has gone beyond a month and the picketing farmers—mostly from the food bowl states of Punjab and Haryana—are in no mood to leave as negotiations with the government have yet to break the deadlock after several rounds of talks. The protest is unlikely to wind down soon as more farmers have joined the picketers.
Shaheen Bagh
Us Ujle Pallu Ka Naam Shaheen Bagh Hai
Lakshmi-Bai Dekh, Razia Sultan Dekh
Hijab Se Ubharta Naya Hindustan Dekh
Andheera Cheerti Taqreraon Ki Awaaz Sun
Badalta Uthta Aurataon Ka Samaaj Sun
In Aurataon Ne Ab Diya Apna Ghar Tyaag Hai
Aur Inke Naye Ghar Ka Naam Shaheen Bagh Hai
The name of that cloth is Shaheen Bagh.
Come see Lakshmibai, see Razia Sultan,
See a new India emerge from the hijab,
Tearing the dark, hear the chorus of appeal.
Hear the nation of women, transform, rise
These women sacrificed their homes
Their new dwelling is Shaheen Bagh.
Excerpts from Naam Shaheen Bagh, a poem by Darab Farooqui and translated by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee
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2020 is also a year of protests—against the citizenship amendment act (CAA) in Assam, in Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh and across India, against the gang rape and murder of a teenager in Hathras, against racism in America (#BlackLivesMatter), against mainland China’s anti-democracy policies in Hong Hong…or by US groups opposing gun control. The most heart-wrenching were demonstrations by frontline Covid warriors. It’s not wrong to ask doctors and nurses to work hard, sacrifice, take care of their patients, but it’s wrong to send them in without the protection they deserve.
