FREE FALL THOUGHTS

22nd March 2020 , India went into a self-imposed day long lock down - the "JANTA" CURFEW. A full dress rehearsal for things to come, except that nobody had a clue of scope & extent of the drama going to unfold in coming days. On March 18th, PMO twitter handle released a tweet late in the night, mentioning PM would address the nation tomorrow at 8 PM. PM Shri @narendramodi will address the nation on 19th March 2020 at 8 PM, during which he will talk about issues relating to COVID-19 and the efforts to combat it. — PMO India (@PMOIndia) March 18, 2020 Indians know, what happens when PM addresses nation at 8 PM. Last time when it happened on a mild winter November 8, 2016 evening, we really had a hard time. The 500 and 1000 rupee currency notes were banned overnight and literally brought everyone on road - standing in queues for withdrawing money, exchanging outgoing currency and what not. Since the declaration of Covid-19 as pandemic a week ago, people were ...

Corona - The Pandemic By the time it was second week of March 2020, the novel corona virus had already infected more than 100,000 persons and had claimed over 4000 lives and had spread to over 100 countries. Human race had collectively outlived many a disasters, diseases and epidemics even in the age when we had not made enough so called "developments" - in medical science, communication networks and information technology. But this one turning out to be different and scary - because of its global transmission and because no one knew the cure. The Covid-19 gained world wide attention, may be because rich and influential were at risk equally. Rather the rich and "connected" were more at risk than poor and "isolated". Common flu virus (Influenza) had killed more people last year - mostly poor estimated numbers varying from ~300,000 to 600,000. Nobody on this world gets bothered with some thing that affects poor. Their votes during elections may be ...