Once earlier, while writing for this website, past midnight I had peered over desolate sodium-lamp lit streets from my balcony and pondered about the fate of thousands of migrant workers trudging back home, many on empty stomachs. It is past fifty days since the largest post-partition human migration started after nationwide lockdown was clamped and public transport terminated without prior notice.
Atticus Finch, the fictional character from Harper Lee's iconic To Kill A Mockingbird, in one of his pearls of wisdom to daughter, Scout, said: “You never know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk about in them.” For a moment, let's imagine ourselves as those lumbering to villages and towns, and ask—what was there in it for me? More precisely—what specific message did Prime Minister Narendra Modi have for those who have so far escaped the coronavirus yet taken the full brunt of the pandemic and a state deficient in its response?