When migrant workers in millions swamped TV screens, becoming a story as big as the pandemic itself, there were many images to unsettle the conscience of fellow Indians. You could have your pick from desperate crowds at bus terminals; famished children with plastic bottles for shoes trudging along highways; people stuffed into trucks like slave labour; pregnant women walking hundreds of kilometres; people dying in road accidents and on railway tracks.
Post-reforms India, all caught up in preening itself, didn’t seem so sophisticated and globalized any longer. Suddenly, also visible in the mirror now were very. . .
