Ep 09 Pandemic Tapes: India Under Lockdowns

On the finale episode of season one of Beyond the Lines, our co-host Chirag Thakkar gets on a call with Anoo Bhuyan, Soutik Biswas and Dr Kalpana Swaminathan to unpack the events spanning over a year of the Covid-19 pandemic as well as its second wave that wreaked havoc on India’s peoples. Over two summers, India woke up to the same cycles of news: people falling sick in hordes; a shortage of beds, medicines, emergency wards, ambulances, testing kits, information, systems, oxygen, the list could go on. Bearing witness to this ongoing disaster that we are, likely, still in the middle of, the special wrap-up episode tries to make sense of an India that never went out of the SOS mode since March 2020.

Anoo Bhuyan is a journalist who covers health at Indiaspend.com; Soutik Biswas is India Correspondent and Features and Analysis Editor at BBC India, and Dr. Kalpana Swaminathan, who writes with Dr. Ishrat Syed under the pseudonym Kalpish Ratna is a writer and surgeon. Anoo, Soutik and Kalpana are also contributors, among others, to a publishers’ set of essays titled, The Dark Hour: India under Lockdowns, forthcoming in the fall of 2021 with Roli Books.

We will be back with more in the second season of Beyond the Lines; stay tuned.

Hosts and Executive Producers: Priya Kapoor and Chirag Thakkar.

Show Producer: Aria Nanji.

Produced by Roli Pulse, a digital initiative by Roli Books.  

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