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

or 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.

I often tell people that sometimes the biggest regret for a journalist is not being wrong but being right. That was true for me with Covid-19. I think it was December 31, 2019; at our afternoon edit meeting, someone was highlighting wire stories on a mysterious Chinese flu. "We should track this closely," I remember saying. "It's the kind of thing that could mean the end of the world."

The comment was made half in jest, but by mid-February, people in the Hindustan Times newsroom were tracking news, data, and scientific developments associated with the flu.

For some time, till the Union health ministry started collating data from the states, we were the only ones with that information. Around the same time, Kunal and I created a contingency plan on how the newsroom would work — we didn't close it even during the peak of the pandemic — if things went south. They did.