Introduction

It was the early days of the pandemic and the lockdown, when the world was grappling with fear and uncertainty generated by the barrage of information storming from multiple sources, which ranged from speculations to seemingly definitive proclamations. Three of us came together through the digital medium to share our experiences of making sense of all that we were seeing, hearing, and experiencing. We were confronted, on the one hand, with a deep sense of anxiety over our survival and those around us, while on the other, with an aggravating fear of losing human touch. The familiarity of everydayness began to disappear from every walk of life, when we stepped towards making the transition into a new world order. We found that our conversations not only revolved around ways to understand and cope with the new reality that confronted us but the need to critically engage with the rationale of this sudden shift and human responses that stemmed from it. While it is too early to be able to find resolutions, the contexts of what is ‘safe’ ‘universal’, ‘homogeneous’, ‘labour’, ‘essential’, ‘access’, ‘discrimination’ stimulate crucial debates against the backdrop of the pandemic. We wanted to create a platform where people from across cultures and professions could articulate their experiences. This volume foregrounds diverse critical and artistic perspectives that may have been triggered by the pandemic but do not remain confined to it. Rather these perspectives, in their parallels and dissonances, make valuable comments on larger structures of contemporary societies which exist irrespective of the current pandemic and also shape human crisis at all levels during the pandemic.