A pandemic of opportunism

Only someone born to riches like Jawaharlal Nehru would dream of a “socialistic pattern of society” for India. Lesser mortals do not need the blistering Covid-19 experience to know that this has always been a catch-as-catch-can profit-driven society. The pandemic could tear aside pieties and posturing and unveil a more authentic India by sparking the kind of economic surge that shaped the Roaring Twenties after the Spanish flu epidemic.

Of course, India does boast a certain underlying holiness that explains why, as the much-maligned Kipling put it with only slight hyperbole, “So long as there is a morsel to divide, neither