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Not an 'Unprecedented Crisis'

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck the country last year, our government had no idea about how to deal with such a circumstance. Our newspapers were flooded with headlines like 'Unprecedented Crisis'. Perhaps it would have been prudent to analyse some instances from our history where people were in a moderately similar situation. 

The 1915 Influenza pandemic that hit the Bengal province of British India claimed at least 12-15 million lives. At that time also there was a mass exodus of migrant workers and the citizens were thrown into utterly pathetic conditions. In the book 'The Age of Pandemics', the author Chinmay Tumbe has verbosely described every pandemic that India has witnessed between 1817 and 1920. 

Had our governments examined these occurrences, maybe we would have dealt with the pandemic in a better way. Thus, Martin Luther King Jr. rightly said, "We are not makers of history. We are made by history".


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