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<a class="gmail-yiv0109168663" href="https://www.propublica.org/article/early-data-shows-african-americans-have-contracted-and-died-of-coronavirus-at-an-alarming-rate" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">
</a><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:8pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><a href="https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca?fbclid=IwAR3t7g_dl10j7XzYs--XDxDF4s3tJj7kigxhYNdeSM6tPhQhvWCouzDjE2c" style="color:blue;text-decoration:underline">https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca?fbclid=IwAR3t7g_dl10j7XzYs--XDxDF4s3tJj7kigxhYNdeSM6tPhQhvWCouzDjE2c</a><span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><b><span style="font-size:24pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Arundhati Roy: ‘The pandemic is a portal’<span></span></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Arundhati Roy – April 3, 2020</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><br><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Who can use the term “gone viral”
now without shuddering a little? Who can look at anything any more — a door
handle, a cardboard carton, a bag of vegetables — without imagining it swarming
with those unseeable, undead, unliving blobs dotted with suction pads waiting
to fasten themselves on to our lungs? <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Who can think of kissing a stranger,
jumping on to a bus or sending their child to school without feeling real fear?
Who can think of ordinary pleasure and not assess its risk? Who among us is not
a quack epidemiologist, virologist, statistician and prophet? Which scientist
or doctor is not secretly praying for a miracle? Which priest is not —
secretly, at least — submitting to science? <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">And even while the virus proliferates,
who could not be thrilled by the swell of birdsong in cities, peacocks dancing
at traffic crossings and the silence in the skies?<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">The number of cases worldwide this
week crept <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/a5847177-f993-3c8e-af60-747e6109cb7d" style="color:blue;text-decoration:underline">over a
million</a>. More than 50,000 people have died already. Projections suggest
that number will swell to hundreds of thousands, perhaps more. The virus has
moved freely along the pathways of trade and international capital, and the
terrible illness it has brought in its wake has locked humans down in their
countries, their cities and their homes.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">But unlike the flow of capital, this
virus seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to
some extent, reversed the direction of the flow. It has mocked immigration
controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data
analytics, and struck hardest — thus far — in the richest, most powerful
nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt. Temporarily
perhaps, but at least long enough for us to examine its parts, make an
assessment and decide whether we want to help fix it, or look for a better
engine.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">The mandarins who are managing this
pandemic are fond of speaking of war. They don’t even use war as a metaphor,
they use it literally. But if it really were a war, then who would be better
prepared than the US? If it were not masks and gloves that its frontline
soldiers needed, but guns, smart bombs, bunker busters, submarines, fighter
jets and nuclear bombs, would there be a shortage?<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Night after night, from halfway
across the world, some of us watch the <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/5e7223e2-6d25-11ea-89df-41bea055720b" style="color:blue;text-decoration:underline">New York
governor</a>’s press briefings with a fascination that is hard to explain. We
follow the statistics, and hear the stories of overwhelmed hospitals in the US,
of underpaid, overworked nurses having to make masks out of garbage bin liners
and old raincoats, risking everything to bring succour to the sick. About
states being forced to bid against each other for ventilators, about doctors’
dilemmas over which patient should get one and which left to die. And we think
to ourselves, “My God! This is <i>America</i>!”<br>
<b>The tragedy is immediate, real, epic</b> and unfolding before our eyes. But
it isn’t new. It is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the
track for years. Who doesn’t remember the videos of “patient dumping” — sick
people, still in their hospital gowns, butt naked, being surreptitiously dumped
on street corners? Hospital doors have too often been closed to the less
fortunate citizens of the US. It hasn’t mattered how sick they’ve been, or how
much they’ve suffered. <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">At least not until now — because
now, in the era of the virus, a poor person’s sickness can affect a wealthy
society’s health. And yet, even now, Bernie Sanders, the senator who has
relentlessly campaigned for healthcare for all, is considered an outlier in his
bid for the White House, even by his own party.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">The tragedy is the wreckage of a
train that has been careening down the track for years<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">And what of my country, my poor-rich
country, India, suspended somewhere between feudalism and religious
fundamentalism, caste and capitalism, ruled by far-right Hindu nationalists? <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">In December, while China was
fighting the outbreak of the virus in Wuhan, the government of India was
dealing with a mass uprising by hundreds of thousands of its citizens
protesting against the brazenly discriminatory anti-Muslim <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/2040a576-3cec-11ea-b232-000f4477fbca" style="color:blue;text-decoration:underline">citizenship
law</a> it had just passed in parliament.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">The first case of Covid-19 was
reported in India on January 30, only days after the honourable chief guest of
our Republic Day Parade, Amazon forest-eater and Covid-denier <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/36020f3c-cf50-427b-a83a-bda122bec593" style="color:blue;text-decoration:underline">Jair
Bolsonaro</a>, had left Delhi. But there was too much to do in February for the
virus to be accommodated in the ruling party’s timetable. There was the official
visit of President Donald Trump scheduled for the last week of the month. He
had been lured by the promise of an audience of 1m people in a sports stadium
in the state of Gujarat. All that took money, and a great deal of time.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Then there were the Delhi Assembly
elections that the Bharatiya Janata Party was slated to lose unless it upped
its game, which it did, unleashing a vicious, no-holds-barred Hindu nationalist
campaign, replete with threats of <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/a864a060-57e5-11ea-a528-dd0f971febbc" style="color:blue;text-decoration:underline">physical
violence</a> and the shooting of “traitors”.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">It lost anyway. So then there was
punishment to be meted out to Delhi’s Muslims, who were blamed for the
humiliation. Armed mobs of Hindu vigilantes, backed by the police, attacked Muslims
in the working-class neighbourhoods of north-east Delhi. Houses, shops, mosques
and schools were burnt. Muslims who had been expecting the attack fought back.
More than 50 people, Muslims and some Hindus, were killed. <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Thousands moved into refugee camps
in local graveyards. Mutilated bodies were still being pulled out of the
network of filthy, stinking drains when government officials had their first
meeting about Covid-19 and most Indians first began to hear about the existence
of something called hand sanitiser.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">March was busy too. The first two
weeks were devoted to toppling the Congress government in the central Indian
state of Madhya Pradesh and installing a BJP government in its place. On March
11 the World Health Organization declared that Covid-19 was a pandemic. Two
days later, on March 13, the health ministry said that corona “is not a health
emergency”. <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Finally, on March 19, the Indian
prime minister addressed the nation. He hadn’t done much homework. He borrowed
the playbook from France and Italy. He told us of the need for “social
distancing” (easy to understand for a society so steeped in the practice of
caste) and called for a day of “people’s curfew” on March 22. He said nothing
about what his government was going to do in the crisis, but he asked people to
come out on their balconies, and ring bells and bang their pots and pans to
salute health workers. <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">He didn’t mention that, until that
very moment, India had been exporting protective gear and respiratory
equipment, instead of keeping it for Indian health workers and hospitals.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Not surprisingly, Narendra Modi’s
request was met with great enthusiasm. There were pot-banging marches,
community dances and processions. Not much social distancing. In the days that
followed, men jumped into barrels of sacred cow dung, and BJP supporters threw
cow-urine drinking parties. Not to be outdone, many Muslim organisations
declared that the Almighty was the answer to the virus and called for the
faithful to gather in mosques in numbers.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><b><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">On March 24, at 8pm,</span></b><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""> Modi appeared on TV again to announce that, from midnight
onwards, all of India would be under <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/41f92956-6c2e-11ea-89df-41bea055720b" style="color:blue;text-decoration:underline">lockdown</a>.
Markets would be closed. All transport, public as well as private, would be
disallowed. <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">He said he was taking this decision
not just as a prime minister, but as our family elder. Who else can decide,
without consulting the state governments that would have to deal with the
fallout of this decision, that a nation of 1.38bn people should be locked down
with zero preparation and with four hours’ notice? His methods definitely give
the impression that India’s prime minister thinks of citizens as a hostile
force that needs to be ambushed, taken by surprise, but never trusted.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Locked down we were. Many health
professionals and epidemiologists have applauded this move. Perhaps they are
right in theory. But surely none of them can support the calamitous lack of
planning or preparedness that turned the world’s biggest, most punitive
lockdown into the exact opposite of what it was meant to achieve.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">The man who loves spectacles created
the mother of all spectacles.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">As an appalled world watched, India
revealed herself in all her shame — her brutal, structural, social and economic
inequality, her callous indifference to suffering. <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">The lockdown worked like a chemical
experiment that suddenly illuminated hidden things. As shops, restaurants,
factories and the construction industry shut down, as the wealthy and the
middle classes enclosed themselves in gated colonies, our towns and megacities
began to extrude their working-class citizens — their migrant workers — like so
much unwanted accrual. <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Many driven out by their employers and
landlords, millions of impoverished, hungry, thirsty people, young and old,
men, women, children, sick people, blind people, disabled people, with nowhere
else to go, with no public transport in sight, began a <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/31f42743-e211-48f9-af4a-66f67a7f7a04" style="color:blue;text-decoration:underline">long
march home</a> to their villages. They walked for days, towards Badaun, Agra,
Azamgarh, Aligarh, Lucknow, Gorakhpur — hundreds of kilometres away. Some died
on the way.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Our towns and megacities began to
extrude their working-class citizens like so much unwanted accrual<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">They knew they were going home
potentially to slow starvation. Perhaps they even knew they could be carrying
the virus with them, and would infect their families, their parents and
grandparents back home, but they desperately needed a shred of familiarity,
shelter and dignity, as well as food, if not love. <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">As they walked, some were beaten
brutally and humiliated by the police, who were charged with strictly enforcing
the curfew. Young men were made to crouch and frog jump down the highway.
Outside the town of Bareilly, one group was herded together and hosed down with
chemical spray. <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">A few days later, worried that the <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/069d818c-6df9-11ea-89df-41bea055720b" style="color:blue;text-decoration:underline">fleeing population</a>
would spread the virus to villages, the government sealed state borders even
for walkers. People who had been walking for days were stopped and forced to
return to camps in the cities they had just been forced to leave.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Among older people it evoked
memories of the population transfer of 1947, when India was divided and
Pakistan was born. Except that this current exodus was driven by class
divisions, not religion. Even still, these were not India’s poorest people.
These were people who had (at least until now) work in the city and homes to
return to. The jobless, the homeless and the despairing remained where they
were, in the cities as well as the countryside, where deep distress was growing
long before this tragedy occurred. All through these horrible days, the home
affairs minister Amit Shah remained absent from public view.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">When the walking began in Delhi, I
used a press pass from a magazine I frequently write for to drive to Ghazipur,
on the border between Delhi and Uttar Pradesh.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">The scene was biblical. Or perhaps
not. The Bible could not have known numbers such as these. The lockdown to
enforce physical distancing had resulted in the opposite — physical compression
on an unthinkable scale. This is true even within India’s towns and cities. The
main roads might be empty, but the poor are sealed into cramped quarters in
slums and shanties.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Every one of the walking people I
spoke to was worried about the virus. But it was less real, less present in
their lives than looming unemployment, starvation and the violence of the
police. Of all the people I spoke to that day, including a group of Muslim
tailors who had only weeks ago survived the anti-Muslim attacks, one man’s
words especially troubled me. He was a carpenter called Ramjeet, who planned to
walk all the way to Gorakhpur near the Nepal border.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">“Maybe when Modiji decided to do
this, nobody told him about us. Maybe he doesn’t know about us”, he said. <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">“Us” means approximately 460m
people.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><b><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">State governments in India </span></b><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">(as in the US) have showed more heart and understanding in
the crisis. Trade unions, private citizens and other collectives are
distributing food and emergency rations. The central government has been slow
to respond to their desperate appeals for funds. It turns out that the prime
minister’s National Relief Fund has no ready cash available. Instead, money
from well-wishers is pouring into the somewhat mysterious new PM-CARES fund.
Pre-packaged meals with Modi’s face on them have begun to appear. <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">In addition to this, the prime
minister has shared his yoga nidra videos, in which a morphed, animated Modi
with a dream body demonstrates yoga asanas to help people deal with the stress
of self-isolation.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">The narcissism is deeply troubling. Perhaps
one of the asanas could be a request-asana in which Modi requests the French
prime minister to allow us to renege on the very troublesome Rafale fighter jet
deal and use that €7.8bn for desperately needed emergency measures to support a
few million hungry people. Surely the French will understand.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">As the lockdown enters its second
week, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/1d77d839-5dab-408f-b2e4-3506d257771b" style="color:blue;text-decoration:underline">supply
chains have broken</a>, medicines and essential supplies are running low.
Thousands of truck drivers are still marooned on the highways, with little food
and water. Standing crops, ready to be harvested, are slowly rotting. <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">The economic crisis is here. The
political crisis is ongoing. The mainstream media has incorporated the Covid
story into its 24/7 toxic anti-Muslim campaign. An organisation called the
Tablighi Jamaat, which held a meeting in Delhi before the lockdown was
announced, has turned out to be a “super spreader”. That is being used to
stigmatise and demonise Muslims. The overall tone suggests that Muslims
invented the virus and have deliberately spread it as a form of jihad.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">The Covid crisis is still to come.
Or not. We don’t know. If and when it does, we can be sure it will be dealt
with, with all the prevailing prejudices of religion, caste and class
completely in place. <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Today (April 2) in India, there are
almost 2,000 confirmed cases and 58 deaths. These are surely unreliable
numbers, based on woefully few tests. Expert opinion varies wildly. Some
predict millions of cases. Others think the toll will be far less. We may never
know the real contours of the crisis, even when it hits us. All we know is that
the run on hospitals has not yet begun.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">India’s public hospitals and clinics
— which are unable to cope with the almost 1m children who die of diarrhoea,
malnutrition and other health issues every year, with the hundreds of thousands
of tuberculosis patients (a quarter of the world’s cases), with a vast anaemic
and malnourished population vulnerable to any number of minor illnesses that
prove fatal for them — will not be able to cope with a crisis that is like what
Europe and the US are dealing with now. <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">All healthcare is more or less on
hold as hospitals have been turned over to the service of the virus. The trauma
centre of the legendary All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi is
closed, the hundreds of cancer patients known as cancer refugees who live on
the roads outside that huge hospital driven away like cattle.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">People will fall sick and die at
home. We may never know their stories. They may not even become statistics. We
can only hope that the studies that say the virus likes cold weather are
correct (though other researchers have cast doubt on this). Never have a people
longed so irrationally and so much for a burning, punishing Indian summer.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">What is this thing that has happened
to us? It’s a virus, yes. In and of itself it holds no moral brief. But it is
definitely more than a virus. Some believe it’s God’s way of bringing us to our
senses. Others that it’s a Chinese conspiracy to take over the world.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Whatever it is, coronavirus has made
the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our
minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”,
trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the
rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it
offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves.
Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Historically, pandemics have forced
humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no
different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">We can choose to walk through it,
dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks
and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk
through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready
to fight for it.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><i><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><a href="https://www.ft.com/content/04d1cf6a-da13-11e7-a039-c64b1c09b482" style="color:blue;text-decoration:underline">Arundhati
Roy</a>’s latest novel is ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’ </span></i><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><i><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Copyright © Arundhati Roy 2020</span></i><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 10pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><i><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Follow <a href="https://twitter.com/FTLifeArts" target="_blank" style="color:blue;text-decoration:underline">@FTLifeArts</a> on
Twitter to find out about our latest stories first. Listen to our podcast, <a href="https://www.ft.com/culture-call" style="color:blue;text-decoration:underline">Culture Call</a>, where FT editors and
special guests discuss life and art in the time of coronavirus. Subscribe on <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/ft-culture-call/id1179847741" target="_blank" style="color:blue;text-decoration:underline">Apple</a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/7q07gI03BxaXirI19PxUGi" target="_blank" style="color:blue;text-decoration:underline">Spotify</a>,
or wherever you listen.</span></i><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 10pt;line-height:115%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""><span> </span></p>
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