Covid revelations

The corona pandemic has taken everyone by surprise. But in India, it has not made the system collapse, rather it has exposed that we did not have a system worth the name to begin with. Here is a quick list of what else we have learnt about ourselves, our leaders and the state of our countrymen and the nation in the past two months...

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Faultlines of a burglary

It was on the night of Monday 27^th April that robbers broke into my parents’ home in Guwahati, in the northeastern state of Assam in India. These days the rooms are used as a Senior Citizens’ Club, which had remained closed for the last several weeks because of the Covid 19-induced complete lockdown that was still in force in India at that point. So no one came to any bodily harm but they ransacked the whole house, opened each cupboard, each drawer and each box and left with what they could find – some cash and a huge amount of bell-metal and copper articles – most of them priceless family heirlooms belonging to my parents, many over a century old. The caretaker’s family was asleep in the adjacent room, I was also in the flat on the first floor directly above, but we heard nothing. So they must have had some idea about which rooms to avoid and must have also worked out a time-interval when everybody would be asleep.

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