To Hell and Back: The Humans of Covid by Barkha Dutt

It took me over two weeks to finish Barkha Dutt's book, To Hell and Back. Not because it reads slowly - quite the contrary. But the scope of the pandemic, and the individual and collective tragedies it contains within it, required me to put it aside for days at a time.

Individual stories stood out, framed in sharp relief perhaps by personal resonance, while larger and more important themes provided context for them. The compassion of the disadvantaged, the callousness of the authorities, the deep humanity of some and the utter inhumanity of others, the sharpening of our myriad inequalities - there is much to unpack.

The knockout chapter for me was that of the children. Girls pushed into child marriage, thousands of kids orphaned and the physical and mental toll of missing school. Learning lost and socialisation arrested because of a poor understanding of the science around kids and Covid and the disproportionate influence of upper class parents, preferring to school their privileged kids at home, with internet, didis and air-conditioning, while poor kids without laptops, smartphones or a voice were left to fend for themselves. And what of the kids in Kashmir, denied the internet because of the presumed and anticipated sins of their elders, effectively without education for two years.

Even in peacetime, orphaned children are at the mercy of a woefully inadequate and uncaring adoption system. In a crisis, it's better not to think of the terrible ways in which its gross inadequacies will have been exposed.

Barkha is a friend, so I acknowledge possible personal bias. But this is an important book: for the range of human stories it documents, thanks to the author’s commitment in traversing the country to do so, and for what it says about our society and how it treats its most vulnerable.