The novelist starts by telling how the coronavirus has changed our lives and how it has overwhelmed us so suddenly. However, she says: ‘The tragedy is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years.’ She goes on to examine how leadership has failed and how the disease threatens India, especially the disadvantaged. She also talks about what the country, and the world, should do next.
‘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.
‘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.
‘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.’
Read here (Financial Times, April 4, 2020)
