India, April 12 -- In this time of enforced leisure and enhanced anxiety, it is impossible to not engage in bouts of counterfactual history. What if, it is repeatedly asked, China hadn't been so pig-headed as to deny and underplay the coronavirus threat when it first manifested itself late last year in Wuhan? What if the overpaid apparatchiks in the World Health Organization hadn't chosen to uncritically accept China's version of the coronavirus? What if we had sealed off the world into compartments much earlier? And, in India, what if the bigoted head of the Tablighi Jamaat had realised the changed circumstances and called off his convention in Delhi's Nizamuddin?
These are questions that will forever haunt us as we stare into an uncertai...