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."

About the Author :
Barkha Dutt is one of India's foremost broadcast journalists. After two decades with NDTV, she is now the Founder-Editor of Mojo Story, an independent digital media platform. A columnist for The Washington Post, she has received more than fifty national and international awards, including the Padma Shri.

Review :
Barkha's ground reporting from COVID hit India has been phenomenal and it was only fitting that she writes a book chronicling the human side of COVID where people are people and not mere numbers. When I met Barkha recently at her book launch program, I told her it's a sad book BUT it's an IMPORTANT book. Barkha brings so many untold stories from the country which we seldom heard or saw on the national TV. What I really liked about it was how Barkha puts herself in the shoes of different people in society and tries to tell their stories; how the pandemic affected each of them differently. Like how it was challenging for menstruating women to work in PPE suits or how doctors were attacked by people because of the stigma around COVID or how closure of schools meant no mid-day meal for poor children and girls being married off early or how it affected the teachers who were charged with election duty and so many more. Rahul Sharma