Nepal, Sept. 17 -- Soon after we went into the national lockdown in March, my TV service provider had the idea of offering a number of films dealing with outbreaks of all manner of diseases in its free movie package. I initially wondered what would drive people to watch such movies when the same thing is being played out in real-time everywhere. I suppose the TV chaps knew human nature much better since, within days, I had watched a couple of those.

The one from the 1990s, Outbreak, was quite bad despite a star cast. But the newer one, Contagion (2011), was spooky since it felt as if the filmmaker had foreseen the current novel coronavirus outbreak, so eerily similar it was to what the world has experienced these past few months. Or, at ...