Sujit Mahapatra

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…

Before the 20th century, the plague caused by rats was the recurring pandemic (there had been other pandemics though like cholera and small pox). There had been three big plague pandemics,…

Historically, most pandemics happened when the viruses were shipped away across the globe. The plague, the deadliest recurring pandemic in history, primarily happened because of rats, which…

The day Satyanagar, where I stay, was sealed on April 8, 2020, I waited with bated breath at the stroke of 4.30PM to listen to Government Chief Spokesperson Subroto Bagchi speak about the…

I remember meeting General KPD Samanta for the first time, a few years back at a meeting of Rotary Heritage, Bhubaneswar in which I talked about BAKUL and our libraries. To the question of a…