Archiving the Pandemic
CES (com)vida 2020
Covid-19 and the Question of Taming Social Anxiety
Gopal Guru
Economic and Political Weekly
Overview
Gopal Guru addresses in this short text the role of social anxiety in India in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, which marks both the behaviour of millions of displaced workers who started a long march towards their homelands as well as communities that entirely came abroad. In both cases we are facing the impact of abandonment and the despair of the most vulnerable in the context of India. More poignant is the form of physical marking of bodies that are contaminated and the extreme levels of surveillance by the authorities and the attribution of "impurity" to doctors who treat patients with COVID-19.