Five years later...

There was a quiet promise implicit in the pandemic era. As we fought a devastating virus, this was a chance to renegotiate, redraw —reimagine — our world. To emerge more united than divided, better equipped, better prepared. We turned inward instead. Do you feel better prepared, in the world we now share?

- R Sukumar

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.

He didn't have a nugget of cricketing wisdom to share on 238, but we discovered a few days later, when Kane Williamson made 238, that until then, it was the second-lowest score never made by a batsman. As it turns out, the column didn't end when I thought it had. The second wave of Covid-19, the Delta wave, struck in April, and I was forced to restart the column. I think I may have written enough to cross the 300-mark. I don't remember the exact number — and therefore don't have a cricket statistic I can tie it to.