Globetrotter’s Vijay Prashad writes in the New York Daily News:
My mother died in Kolkata in September 2020 at the age of 91. She did not die of COVID-19. I was only able to see her cremation via FaceTime.
She lay on the bier, her face peaceful, her long journey over. A few months before she died, she had told me, “I would rather die of COVID than of boredom.”
Just before she died, she left me a note. “The cancer has taken me,” she wrote. The situation in India disturbed her greatly, the slow decline of her abilities mirroring the collapse of the country she loved.
Earlier this year, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced for the luminaries of Davos that India had defeated the disease. COVID did not accept his verdict, which sounded a little bit like George W. Bush’s speech about Iraq made in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner.
Over the past month, the disease has reappeared in India with vengeance, tearing through urban and rural communities, although the devastation in the major cities has been more visible because that is where the media lives. The daily toll has hit 400,000 cases, and daily deaths — at least those officially counted — now exceed 4,200.
…
Read the rest of “India Is Infected: What COVID Hath Wrought” by Globetrotter’s Vijay Prashad at the New York Daily News.
