Towards a Pandemic-Free World?

Ajeeb daastaan hai yeh, kahan shuru, kahan khatam,…

The pandemic which engulfed the world in 2020 is, as the song says, a strange saga of which nobody can say with any certainty where its beginnings lie and where it will end. It is believed that it began in Wuhan in November 2019, exactly a hundred years after the Spanish Flu pandemic which took an enormous toll of human lives. And over the past 24 months or more, the various mutations the virus has been undergoing make it completely incomprehensible as to when it will, if ever, disappear. Much has been written about it and yet, expertise is clogged by a fog of uncertainty. A film released by Netflix on the 24th of December 2021, Don’t Look Up, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence and Meryl Streep, holds up a mirror to the maze the pandemic has thrown mankind into. A satirical science fiction film, two astronomers attempting to warn humanity, via a media tour, about an approaching comet that will destroy human civilization, is a film with a message about climate change. And yet, the message could well be for what COVID-19 has demonstrated about the unpreparedness of governments the world over, and the use of social media to wish away an impending catastrophe. Dissent is given short shrift, as the young Ph.D. candidate who discovers the approach of the comet towards the earth, finds to her dismay. The spoofy film says it all.

Having said that, a thought-provoking article on an institutional website provides a path to hope. ‘Reason and Ethical Decision-making in Korea and India’ by Vyjayanti Raghavan shows that Confucian values have conditioned Koreans even in contemporary times for collectivistic behaviour, while stressing that this in no way curtails individual freedom. However, the underlying ‘cultural grammar’ that the society is structured on, ‘gives them hope in the face of extreme hardship and thus binds the nation together in times of crisis of which there has been no shortage throughout Korean history.’ The paper cites examples to show how the ability to sacrifice self-interest for collective interest has enabled the Korean society and polity to navigate the pandemic, the financial crisis of a decade ago, and most interestingly, the pooling of personal gold for repaying the IMF debt the country had incurred. The pandemic has shown how collective action is the only course open to human civilization to combat adversity.

We in The Book Review Literary Trust say amen to that beacon of hope, for, though in 2020 the long lockdown meant that for the first time in forty-three years the journal had to be published only in the digital format from March to December. 2021 saw the collective hands of generous donors extended. All twelve issues found sponsors and were published in print and digital editions, many of them special issues: on Literature in Translation, South Asia, Children’s Books and on Detective Fiction. We would like to thank Romila Thapar, Sugat Jain of Ratna Sagar, Kishore Mariwala, Rajani and Shirish Patel, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw and Nabanipa Bhattacharya, and above all, the Tata Trusts, for their generous sponsorship and donations. We also thank the donors to the Archives Upload Project, with Nandan Nilekani at the top of the list, and innumerable friends of The Book Review. We are happy to announce that the Archives of the journal from its inception in January 1976 to the current issue are uploaded on its revamped website and can be accessed at: www.thebookreviewindia.org. A special thanks to Mallika Joseph, former Director of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, and members of the Digital Empowerment Foundation headed by Osama Manzar, for making the Archives Upload project happen.

In the January 2022 issue of The Book Review, we have put together a sparkling section on Literature followed by reviews of books on History, Politics, Sociology, Anthropology, Gender and Economics, which highlight the state of the art of scholarship in these genres. As always, the commitment of our reviewers is our greatest asset, and we are always aware that it is they who have brought the journal within five years of the half-century mark. A flavour of the contents in some quotes: reviewing Meher Afshan Farooqi’s book on Ghalib, M Asaduddin writes: ‘It involved quite a bit of literary sleuthing, poring over brittle, dog-eared tomes in dusty libraries, and finally, serendipity, all of which helped Farooqi along in her journey of discovery and resulted in this beautiful book which is undoubtedly a valuable addition to Ghalibiana.’ Anup Singh Beniwal in his review of Plays from a Fractured Land: Punjabi Partition Drama in Translation says: ‘Independent India, as a secular nation, was born in Partition…. Indian creative imagination has continuously engaged with the ever-changing trajectories of this fracture, especially communalism.’ Suraj Thube says in his review of Pedagogy of Dissent: ‘Jahanbegloo’s book still offers a lot more in terms of building networks of solidarities by connecting with the voices of dissent from across the globe.’ Shefali Jha while reviewing Partha Chatterjee’s book, The Truths and Lies of Nationalism: As Narrated by Charvak, says: ‘In the case of the Tamil people, for instance, the Tamil language was revered so much that it was the language rather than the land which was seen as the mother—Tamil Thai or Mother Tamil,…’. And Nazima Parveen reviewing Citizenship, Nationalism and Refugeehood of Rohingyas in Southern Asia, comments: ‘This remarkable volume, in my view, introduces us to an unexplored dimension of what I call the idea of homeland in south Asia. The conflict between the actual statelessness of Rohingyas and their imagined homeland in Myanmar actually undermines a very peculiar form of belongingness.’

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The Book Review Literary Trust wishes all its readers A Very Happy 2022.

Editors