A year after the lockdown, resulting in large scale migrations, wanton job loss and two vaccines, the Covid 19 pandemic is raising its ugly, faceless, hood once again.
On Wednesday, a record 53,375 Covid positive cases were reported countrywide. The second wave, as newspapers report it, is surging ferociously.
At last count, 104 million cases were reported in India since a virus turned our world upside down.
Between the middle of February and middle of March, this year, I drove 4,500 km across six states - Haryana, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand and Bengal - from my home in Gurgaon-on-the-Yamuna (well, almost) to my second home in Roychowk-on-the Ganga, and back, mapping people and places on my first big adventure to break free from the abundant loneliness of one home to the abundant loneliness of the other.
This vast swathe of land along the Ganga is home to 400 million.
And through that expedition, I came across the several layers of faces, each of them unmasked in village after village, town after town.
‘Don’t you fear death,’ I asked each face I met.
And every face stared back at me amused.
‘Death, well, death per se, is lurking just around the corner, here. But this one death has not visited our place so far,’ they said... Repeatedly, several times over.
‘What’s this? Faith?’ I asked, bewildered.
‘Faith, yes,’ they said, singly in unison.
‘It’s our unshakable faith that the curse of God on Earth is not ours to pray for. It’s the evil of the Big City Guy to ward off. This germ was not really meant for us.’
‘So, is that just a matter of faith,’ I asked myself.
I am still waiting for an answer...
Just in case you have one... please write about it.
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