WRITING ACROSS LANGUAGES & IDEAS.

Udweg Aru Anudweg, Volume III

ক’ভিড-১৯ গাথা—ভ্ৰম আৰু বাস্তৱ is the third volume in the Udweg Aru Anudweg series, but it is also a work of a very different kind. It does not look back at the COVID-19 pandemic from the safety of hindsight. Much of it was written while the crisis was still unfolding, when knowledge was incomplete, expert opinion was divided, public fear was intense, and governments worldwide were making decisions under extraordinary uncertainty.

The book describes itself as a reflective, evidence-grounded chronicle connecting global science with regional human experience. That description captures its essential character. It is part scientific commentary, part public diary, part philosophical reflection and part record of how a society experienced an event before anyone could know how the story would end.

My perspective was inevitably shaped by circumstance. I was working as a microbiologist and physician in England, one of the country’s most heavily affected, while closely following events in India and Assam. I therefore observed the pandemic from two very different social and healthcare environments. The purpose of the writing was not to deny the seriousness of the disease, but to ask whether fear, policy and public interpretation were always proportionate to what the evidence could actually establish at a particular moment.

A recurring concern was the distinction between what was known, what was inferred, and what was feared.

That distinction became increasingly difficult to maintain. Epidemiological models, laboratory results, political decisions, television commentary, social-media claims and individual anxieties began to occupy the same informational space. Very early in the pandemic I was already writing about a parallel “infodemic”—the possibility that information and misinformation could alter social behaviour almost as profoundly as the virus itself.

The book therefore pays particular attention to uncertainty: uncertainty in estimates of infection and mortality, uncertainty in modelling, uncertainty about transmission, and eventually uncertainty about the meaning of diagnostic results themselves. It also examines fear as a biological and social force—through nocebo effects, mass anxiety, media amplification and the extraordinary psychological atmosphere in which individuals and institutions were required to act. The manuscript’s critical review identifies this concern with fear, misinformation and digitally amplified panic as one of the central threads running through the work.

Yet the book is not simply a critique of pandemic policy. One of its purposes is to preserve disagreement.

The inclusion of both the Great Barrington Declaration and the John Snow Memorandum is deliberate. These represented sharply different positions within the scientific community on lockdown, herd immunity and focused protection. Rather than retrospectively declaring one side unquestionably correct, the book preserves both arguments as evidence that legitimate scientific reasoning can diverge when evidence is incomplete and ethical trade-offs are unavoidable.

Assam provides another important dimension. A global pandemic was experienced locally: through particular health systems, cultural expectations, political responses and public anxieties. Writing about these events in Assamese was therefore not merely a matter of language. It situated a global scientific crisis within a regional intellectual and social experience that would otherwise largely disappear from the predominantly Anglophone record of the pandemic.

The chronological form is important. The entries preserve uncertainty rather than editing it away. Ideas change, predictions sometimes fail, sources prove unreliable, and interpretations evolve. That is not an accidental weakness of the book; it is part of what the book records. The pandemic itself arrived as fragments—partial data, changing advice, conflicting expertise, and rapidly shifting assumptions. The narrative deliberately retains something of that instability.

In my own introduction to the volume, I described these writings as something like a public diary. The hope was that, among its fragmented observations, readers might encounter a narrative complementary to the dominant story of fear—not a counter-dogma, but evidence and observations that received comparatively little public attention at the time.

Seen within the larger Udweg Aru Anudweg project, the progression is perhaps clearer. The first volumes asked how professionals, institutions and societies reason about evidence and responsibility. COVID-19 transformed that philosophical question into an immense natural experiment. Suddenly, the interpretation of evidence was no longer an abstract concern: laboratory tests, statistical models, expert authority, uncertainty, and public communication determined how billions of people lived.

The enduring subject of ক’ভিড-১৯ গাথা—ভ্ৰম আৰু বাস্তৱ is therefore not COVID-19 alone.

It is what happens when a society must act before it fully knows.

And perhaps that is why the book belongs naturally within Udweg Aru Anudweg: উদ্বেগ alerts us to danger, but অনুদ্বেগ asks us to retain enough composure to distinguish danger from fear, evidence from inference, and reality from the stories we construct around it.