Shiv Visvanathan

What sustains us as a society is four ideas or four truths. These are Bollywood, cricket, science and democracy. All four have failed us in Covid times.

Schools should attempt to teach futurology, bringing a new sensitivity about time, a playfulness about prediction and change, and a trusteeship for the rights of future generations.

The real casualty of the Covid seems to be the newspaper. A sense of tragedy is lost in the celebration of the technological.

We see man as the centre and controller of the earth, without realising the earth can do without us.

The virus seems to be both a literary and scientific disaster which we need to re-read and invent in the years to come.

It is not just that Scindia’s role is badly enacted but the silence of other Congress leaders is also frustrating. Even Rahul or Sonia or the CM could do with a few more lines of explanation.

Civil society has to respond, rise to the occasion inventively and to respond to a regime that does not understand the spirit of the preamble.

Democracy as protest creates ambush and lethal surprises which warns regimes that democracy never lets politics to be taken for granted.

The protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act ambushed the government and surprised India.

It is a time where the government that has been pontificating for years, gets a lesson in politics. For all its brutality, the government is speechless.