To Hell and Back: Humans of COVID

The classic book on India’s COVID pandemic 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, 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. Moving, gripping and vivid, To Hell and Back is an outstanding work by one of our foremost journalists, working at the height of her powers.