India, March 22 -- Last Saturday and Sunday, March 14 and 15 to be precise, I was preoccupied with a mass contact programme organised by the West Bengal unit of the BJP centred on the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. The programme took me to Cossipore and Behala - two extreme ends of Kolkata. Naturally, as happens in any political programme that has one eye on elections - the elections to the Kolkata Municipal Corporation were due in late April - the visits were concentrated around slums where there are big concentration of voters.
That weekend, in Kolkata at least, there was minimum mass awareness of the COVID-19 pandemic that had begun unsettling large parts of the world. I did not sight individuals with masks and the notion of social distan...