Barkha Dutt, one of India’s most prominent journalists and television anchors, became a household name with her reporting from the front lines during the Kargil conflict between India and Pakistan in 1999. In addition to her war reporting (from countries as varied as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, and Libya), in India she has reported from the field on virtually every important national story— politics, insurgencies, social upheavals, floods, and famine. She has won more than forty national and international honours for her work.
<p>Since 2020, our world has battled a single enemy – the coronavirus. In dealing with the pandemic, India has seen its own challenges and special tragedies. Two years of the pandemic may have already claimed anywhere between 3 and 5 million Indian lives. The lockdown of the first wave caused unprecedented devastation. 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, doctor...</p><div><br></div>