By Chinmay Tumbe,
Harper Collins
Eight months ago when his eight-year-old son asked about pandemics, Chinmay Tumbe got anxious about the far reaching impact of disease outbreaks, what with COVID-19 turning into a deadly pandemic in living memory. The IIM-Ahmedabad professor felt his son was too young to know the word and it led him to research earlier pandemic experiences and the devastation caused.
The urgency to write a book emerged because Tumbe wanted to establish the relevance of learning from previous demographic disasters. The understanding of the past can help to tackle contemporary challenges, he says, and so, chose to write about cholera, plague and influenza that globally claimed 70 million lives between 1817 and 1920.