Barkha Dutt - In Defence Of The Truth

Barkha Dutt's crushingly personal documentation of the pandemic lays bare the many inequities across class, caste and gender

- Arman Khan

It’s a visual that recurrently informs the better part of journalist Barkha Dutt’s first wave coverage: Scores of migrant workers walking the hollowed-out streets of Delhi with skyscrapers and brutalist bridges shadowing them. No help in sight, their slippers tattered and their spirits only seconds away from completely slipping into an endless pit of oblivion.

And yet, this was a lonely journey for everyone involved, as thousands of them hurtled into a future they didn’t know existed.

As she writes in her latest book To Hell And Back: Humans of Covid (published by Juggernaut), apart from a few odd stringers and beat reporters, news television anchors much rather “preferred sitting in their airconditioned studios, speaking to experts rather than having boots on the ground.”