Five years later…: R Sukumar looks back on how we fared in and after the pandemic

There was a quiet promise implicit in the pandemic era. Amid the devastation, a chance to renegotiate and reimagine our world. Why did we turn inward instead?

For ten-and-a-half months, from the middle of March 2020 to January 1 the following year, I wrote a column (called Dispatch, and numbered) every weekday on Covid-19. By the time I stopped the column (or thought I’d stopped it), I had written 238. My colleague and HT’s managing editor Kunal Pradhan, who edited almost all – everyone needs editing – would typically stop by to tell me the cricketing significance of the number of columns I’d written till that day.