Lessons in resilience in the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in
India.
Focusing on the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in India between
April and December 2021, Rustom Bharucha's timely essay reflects on four
interconnected realities that haunted this ongoing crisis--death, grief,
mourning, and extinction. How do we cope with multiple deaths and the
dislocation of rituals when the act of mourning is either postponed or
denied? What roles do political surveillance, censorship, the regulation
of lockdowns, and the sheer indifference to the lives of people play in
the containment of civil liberties? Through vivid examples of
photography, theater, dance, visual arts, and the cultures of everyday
life, this meditative essay illuminates both the horror of the pandemic
as well as its unexpected intimacies and revelations of shared
suffering. Against the destruction of nature and the disrespect for the
nonhuman, The Second Wave offers lessons in resilience through its
reflections on the ethos of waiting and the need to re-envision breath
as a vital resource of self-renewal and resistance.