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Humans of Covid
A Tragedy Chronicled
Speakers
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 triggered a new challenge.
When India’s lockdown was first announced in March 2020, journalist Barkha Dutt started an
extraordinary series of road trips, recording the human story of the pandemic. 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.
To Hell and Back is a sensitive work by one of our foremost journalists.
Speakers
Barkha Dutt
Barkha Dutt, one of India’s best known broadcast journalists, with over 20 years of experience, is the Founder-Editor of digital platform Mojo Story and a columnist with the Washington Post and the Hindustan Times.
Dutt, an Emmy-nominated reporter, is the winner of over 40 national and international awards. She has been recognised twice as Global Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum, and been honoured with the Padmashri, India’s fourth-highest civilian honour. She has been chosen as an Asia Society ASIA 21 Fellow as well as a Meera and Vikram Gandhi Fellow at the Brown University’s Watson Institute.
Known for her ground reporting from some of the toughest hotspots in the world, Dutt most recently earned global acclaim with her relentless frontline reporting of the COVID pandemic over 16 months throughout the world’s biggest lockdown. Named by Vogue as a COVID Warrior, she won the US-based Emergent Ventures India COVID Prize for her reportage as well as eight awards at the 2021 News Broadcasters Association Awards in India.
Her latest book is To Hell and Back” Humans of Covid. She is also the author of This Unquiet Land: Stories from India’s Fault Lines
Dutt studied at St. Stephens College, Delhi and Columbia University, New York.
Nirupama Menon Rao
Nirupama Rao is a former Indian Foreign Service officer. She retired as Foreign Secretary to the Government of India, the senior most position in the Foreign Service, being the second woman to occupy the post (2009-2011). She was the first woman spokesperson (2001-02) of the Indian foreign office. She served as India’s first woman High Commissioner (Ambassador) to Sri Lanka (2004-2006) and to the People’s Republic of China (2006-2009). She was Ambassador of India to the United States from 2011 to 2013. In retirement she has been a Senior Visiting Fellow in International and Public Affairs at the Watson Institute at Brown University where she has taught an undergraduate seniors course on “India in the World” and George Ball Adjunct Professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. Ambassador Rao was a Fellow at the India-China Institute of The New School, New York in 2016 and a Public Policy Fellow at The Wilson Center, Washington D.C. in 2017. She is now a Global Fellow of The Wilson Center. She was a Jawaharlal Nehru Fellow from 2015-2016 and a Practitioner-in-Residence at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy in 2017. She is a member of the Board of Governors of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore and a Councillor on the World Refugee and MigrationCouncil. She has an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters (2012) from Pondicherry University. . She is a staunch believer in the power of social media as an advocacy platform for policy and currently has over 1.3 million followers on Twitter. In 2016, she received the Vanitha Ratna Award from the Government of Kerala. She also received the Fellowship of Peace Award of the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Center in Washington D.C in 2018.
Ambassador Rao is a Founder-Trustee with her husband, Sudhakar, of The South Asian Symphony Foundation a not-for-profit Trust which is dedicated to promoting mutual understanding in South Asia through the creation of a South Asian Symphony Orchestra.
Her most recent book is ‘The Fractured Himalaya: India Tibet China, 1949 to 1962’, published by Penguin Random House.
