Sujit Mahapatra

I remember as a young child, when I was once asked if I wanted to join the civil services when I grew up, I had responded with an arrogance I had obviously picked up from others, “No, I…

Well, I had decided to hang up my boots after writing 10 articles in a series on pandemics in history. What had got me fascinated was the sense of déjà vu I got while reading up on pandemics…

When I was asked to self quarantine myself at home, I was interested to explore why a 14th century maritime practice of “quarantine” was being used in 2020. Also, after watching Contagion, I…

We are all worried today about how this pandemic will end, and we will be able to live without fear. Most of us hope that we soon have a vaccine that will help stop the devastation just as…

There is a lot of speculation currently about how COVID-19 is going to change our lives and the course of history. But then almost every pandemic has influenced the course of history. Wars…

When pandemics have led to persecution of certain communities, which has been pretty common as we discussed in the previous article, they are often accused of using disease as a biological…

On April 6, 2020, Subroto Bagchi, chief spokesperson of the Odisha government for COVID-19 pandemic, warned in his daily briefing that the communal virus was more dangerous than the…

India bore the brunt of the pandemics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the plague pandemic and the Spanish Flu, which arrived on ships to Mumbai and spread across the country like…

The Encyclopaedia Britannica says that long long back it was a maxim that the plague never appeared east of the Indus River. That is of course because then the origins of plague in eastern…

A research sponsored by the Chinese Government in 2019 had warned of a new coronavirus from bats in China. “The majority of the coronaviruses (CoVs) can be found in China. Moreover, most of…