Covid-19: How India failed to prevent a deadly second wave
image captionFamily members of a person who died of Covid-19 react during a cremation
In early March, India s health minister Harsh Vardhan declared the country was in the endgame of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Mr Vardhan also lauded Prime Minister Narendra Modi s leadership as an example to the world in international co-operation . From January onwards, India had begun shipping doses to foreign countries as part of its much-vaunted vaccine diplomacy .
Mr Vardhan s unbridled optimism was based on a sharp drop in reported infections. Since a peak of more than 93,000 cases per day on average in mid-September, infections had steadily declined. By mid-February, India was counting an average of 11,000 cases a day. The seven-day rolling average of daily deaths from the disease had slid to below 100.
India s arts community fears Hindu hard-liners can t take a joke
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India s arts community fears Hindu hardliners can t take a joke
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Shiv Visvanathan
A narrative of a year ending is sometimes more than a literary problem. Usually a year’s events can be assembled like a family album presented with a sense of awe or familiarity. But sometimes, events become surreal and it is not easy to even juxtapose them into any idea of linearity. 2020 was a strange year, full of historical events that somehow looked meaningless. One can list the headlines like a town crier, but as a narrative, the year makes little sense. One has to invent a new genre, a surreal accounting that goes beyond socialist realism or magical realism. Literature and sociology feel helpless before the cascade of events; where history enacts itself as trauma.