To Hell and Back: Humans of COVID

Since 2020, our world has battled a single enemy – the coronavirus. In dealing with the pandemic, India has seen its own challenges and its special tragedies. The lockdown of the first wave, the world's largest, caused unprecedented devastation, arguably even more than the virus. And in 2022, Omicron has trigged a new challenge. When India’s lockdown was first announced in March 2020, acclaimed journalist Barkha Dutt started an extraordinary series of road trips, recording the human story of the pandemic, one which she continues even today as we wrestle with the virus’s latest avatar. In this book, she tells India’s pandemic story through the stories of the people she covered – the migrant workers and politicians, businessmen and bureaucrats, doctors and nurses, factory workers and farmers, teachers and students, husbands and wives, parents and children. And through these accounts, she draws a startling picture not just of our plague years but the very nature of our country with its deep-rooted inequalities across class, caste and gender.