Considering the speed at which the sub-microscopic agent had travelled the world, I felt the pandemic would become a big story. On 26 March 2020, while taking a shower, I decided to write 500 articles on 500 consecutive days to cover this once-in-a-lifetime (hopefully) event. Not having experienced a pandemic before, I had no idea what it was that I planned to write. Intuitively though, I felt the world was in for a cataclysmic shock that would produce an overwhelming amount of material. Daily reporting seemed like the only way to do justice to the scale of the crisis.
*****
Indeed, it proved to be an omni-crisis. Even during
the World Wars; some nations, towns and villages were spared. Not this time.
Covid-19 has entered every country, affected each individual on this planet in a
variety of ways.
My Corona Daily Capsule
was disproportionately skewed towards American news sources. To a lesser
extent, British newspapers and magazines. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Economist, BBC and the Guardian have the financial muscle,
a global network of offices and qualified journalists. No Asian or African
media comes anywhere close. It’s not their fault. Print media in particular is
a rapidly declining business, and most countries lack the money to produce
objective, quality international reporting.
Not that NYT or Economist is top-class
because they are in English language. Google now allows us to read any
newspapers in a language we understand. By way of hyperlinks, over 1,000
newspapers and academic papers have featured in this series.
The aim was to curate and analyse trustworthy sources.
I don’t have television, and don’t use WhatsApp. A responsible writer should
not only give sources, but also judge their credibility. My big thanks to the five
newspapers above for making the Corona Dailies possible. Sat in my chair, I “exploited”
them as if they were my employees. (I was happy to pay them the subscription
charges for working for me).
In this series, I have reported stories from over 100
countries. Ironically, I read some stories about India first in The New
York Times, Economist or BBC. Most human stories are universal
anyway. A hungry person is a hungry person, a school closure affects a child no
matter where, and grief affects all races and nationalities.
*****
Some readers have urged me to continue the corona
dailies till the pandemic ends. (Season two? Negative numbers for countdown?)
For storytellers, the pandemic has ended. In the first hundred days, I was spoilt for choice.
There were days when I had five or six stories to choose from. In the last
month, I had to invest longer hours to find a single subject. Most coronavirus stories
are becoming repetitive, something I wanted to avoid. Why talk about cases,
deaths and vaccines every day? There is no readability there, only data.
And that is the great news. Coronavirus is no longer
novel. As a writer, my worry was not when the pandemic would end, but when the
stories would end. The number 500 was about right.
*****
I must thank
Mena, my wife, the first reader and editor of my writing. For each of the last
five hundred days, she didn’t go to bed until my blog was posted. That is a big
commitment even for an Indian wife.
Many readers sent me messages today saying they had
read each of the 500 articles. In this age of Twitter, that is a monumental
accomplishment. (In terms of word count, the 500 articles together are
equivalent of three full-length novels.) I want to thank all my readers, known
and unknown. Special thanks to Jyoti Ronghe and Becky Payne for giving me
feedback on nearly all articles, and to Shirish Patel for being a
super-spreader of my writing. Such engagement from readers works as a tonic for
a writer.
*****
The End
© Ravi Abhyankar, 2021