In Memoriam: Honoring India's Covid Victims
While the pandemic’s crushing second wave in India has been widely covered, we don’t know much about the innumerable victims across the nation. More than just a statistic, they all led rich lives. Here are profiles of a cross-section of Indians who lost their lives to Covid-19.
Dr. Manisha Jadhav—TB specialist & Chief Medical Officer
A Google search for Manisha Jadhav pulls up images of a warmly smiling woman, a flower tucked stylishly behind her ear. Her messages on social media destroy the illusion:
“May be last good morning. I may not meet you here on this platform. Take care all. Body dies. Soul doesn’t. Soul is immortal.”
On April 19, 2021, Dr. Manisha Jadhav signed off from the outside world. Thereafter, the 51-year-old tuberculosis specialist and Chief Medical Officer at Sewri TB Hospital, Mumbai, died of complications due to Covid-19.
When Covid-19’s second surge hit Mumbai in March 2020, this dedicated hospital administrator was instrumental in mobilizing personal protective equipment for the hospital staff amidst a shortage, and coordinating arrangements for their food and travel when the state went into lockdown. “Doctors are like soldiers. They can’t be unavailable,” she has been quoted as saying.
Dr. Jadhav is survived by her husband, Navnath Jadhav.
Soli Sorabjee—Lawyer, Jazzman, Human Rights Champion
Post the searing summer, Delhi’s music lovers eagerly anticipate a delightful cultural event—the annual Jazz Yatra, held on the lush lawns of Nehru Park. The two-day music fest was a gift to the city from an eminent citizen, Soli Sorabjee (91), among India’s finest legal practitioners, who succumbed to Covid-19.
Over the course of a luminous career—he was a formidable expert in constitution law and twice appointed India’s attorney general—Sorabjee became a larger-than-life persona. His arguments in court, laced with trademark witticisms, were pure theater, drawing crowds who came simply to listen to his eloquence.
Human rights were an issue close to Soli’s heart; in 1997, he served under the UN as a special rapporteur for human rights in Nigeria. He was also Chairman of the UN’s Sub-committee on the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights from 1998 to 2004.
Among Soli’s many accomplishments was his founding of the Jazz India Delhi Chapter, which he headed as the president. Significantly, Soli ensured that promising Indian jazz bands performed at the annual event alongside international ones. It was perhaps fitting that the grand old man left the world on April 30, 2021, a date that marks International Jazz Day.
Manzoor Ahtesham—Hindi Litterateur
Ramzan mein Maut (Death in Ramzan), first published in 1973, is the name of one of renowned Hindi writer Manzoor Ahtesham’s short stories Was it just another of life’s cruel ironies that, 48 years later, death would come calling during the Ramzan of 2021?
Bhopal, a pleasantly green city, was not just home to Manzoor, but also a wellspring of inspiration. The name of his acclaimed novel Sukha Bargad (Withered Banyan) came to him from the Dela Wadi forest near the city. This work, and indeed the bulk of his literary output, was woven around the Muslim community and its steady alienation from mainstream Indian society following Partition.
The urbane and unassuming Manzoor was a popular, respected figure in Bhopal’s social and literary circles. His vast knowledge of world literature spanned both the classics and modern writing. In 2007, New York magazine commended his Dastan-e-Lapata (The Missing Man) as among the world’s best novels that were yet to be translated into English. Manzoor’s work garnered many awards—the Bharatiya Bhasha Parishad Puraskar, Shikhar Samman, and Pahal Samman, among others.
He received the Padma Shri in 2003.
The pandemic had already swept away Manzoor’s wife and his elder brother. He followed them, breathing his last in a Bhopal hospital on April 26, 2021.
Rahul Vohra—Actor & YouTuber
“Mujhe bhi treatment acha mil jata,
To main bhi bach jata, tumhaara
Irahul Vohra”
(If I had received proper treatment, I’d have been saved, too. Yours, Rahul Vohra)
With that poignant message on social media, 35-year-old actor and video blogger Rahul Vohra signed off on May 9, 2021, while hospitalized for Covid-19 in New Delhi.
Uttarakhand-born Rahul was a popular YouTuber with 113,000 subscribers to his channel. He trained as an actor under theater director and playwright Arvind Gaur for five years. In 2014, he played a right-wing activist in the Netflix film Unfreedom. But it was in YouTube that Rahul found his metier; his popularity surged north with the videos he posted, filled with warmth, humor and strong social content.
He contracted Covid-19 in New Delhi during the pandemic’s second wave. This message to his fans is a testament to the failure of the country’s health system:
“I am COVID positive and am hospitalised. For four days, there has been no recovery. Is there any hospital where I can find an oxygen bed? Because here, my oxygen levels are continuously dropping and there is no one to look into it.”
And finally:
“Jald janam lunga and acha kaam karunga. Ab himmat haar chuka hu.”
(I will soon be reborn and do good work. Now, I have lost all hope.)
He leaves behind his wife, writer and poet Jyoti Tiwari, whom he married in December 2020.
Vira Sathidar—Social Activist
A Dalit activist, writer, folk singer and actor, Sathidar, 62, fought injustice, oppression and discrimination all his life. His moment in the sun came when he starred in Court (2014), a multilingual Indian film. His character, a Marathi protest singer named Narayan Kamble, virtually embodied his own struggles and hardscrabble existence. Court received international acclaim, besides being awarded India’s National Film Award for Best Feature Film. Sathidar’s performance, though, was virtually ignored by his state leaders and the central government. Politically, he had always been an inconvenience.
Born in an impoverished family from the lowly Mahar caste, Sathidar was deeply influenced from his early years by Ambedkarite thought. His tryst with formal education was a chequered one, interrupted by his deep involvement with worker agitations. He also worked as a journalist in his later years. The writings of Gorky, Marx, Castro and Ambedkar shaped his thought and inspired his relentless struggle against social ills. Like his character in Court, Sathidar too would stage street performances highlighting the plight of the lower castes.
Labeled an “urban Naxal” by India’s National Investigation Agency and habitually harassed by local police in his native Nagpur, this gritty, unflappable Dalit warrior fell victim to Covid -19 on April 13, 2021.
Subhadra Sen Gupta—Children’s writer, Raconteur
History lessons as we know them can be a yawn at times, but in the skilful hands of children’s writer Subadhra Sen Gupta, the subject transformed into a lively and fun read, drawing young minds into an understanding of their nation’s past. A Children’s History of India. The Consitution of India for Children. A Flag, A Song and A Pinch of Salt: Freedom Fighters of India. These titles, among others, are her legacy. Her life was cut short on May 3, 2021, by the pandemic’s feral race across India. Delhi-born Gupta received the Bal Sahita Puraskar award from the Sahitya Akademi in 2015 for her contribution to children’s literature. Her prolific output also included ghost stories, adventures, historical and detective fiction, and travelogues.
Gupta loved face-to-face interactions with her primary audience—children—listening to them with respect and responding to their queries with affection and patience. In recent years, she expressed her growing distress at school children’s polarized attitudes towards caste and religion. Her historical writing for children, fact-based and infused with humanism, was her way of attempting to counter this troubling and relatively new trend.
Gupta leaves behind a large circle of family, friends and contemporaries from the publishing industry, saddened by the passing of this witty and versatile writer.
V. Chandrasekhar—Former Table-tennis Champion
A bungled knee surgery in 1984 put paid to his dreams of a soaring sports career. But to V. Chandrasekhar (64), a three-time table-tennis national champion, never-say-die was a philosophy of life. Until Covid-19 cut him short in May 2021.
The surgery that forever changed Chandra’s life—a fallout of improperly administered anesthesia—impacted his speech, vision and mobility. The gutsy sports star not only threw himself into a 10-year legal battle against a renowned corporate hospital; he won, too—but reinvented his career, launching Chandra’s Academy to coach promising newcomers in the sport he loved. Over time, he recovered most of his mobility through sheer determination.
During his years as a table-tennis star, Chandra virtually reinvented the perception of the game in India, popularizing the topspin among Indian players. He trained in South Korea and in Japanese champion Ichiro Ogimura’s academy, returning to India with a fearsome forehand that table-tennis aficionados still recollect with awe. As a coach, he gave back generously to the game, launching talented players like S. Raman, M. S. Mythili, Chetan Baboor and G. Sathiyan.
The Indian government honored Chandra with the Arjuna Award in 1982 for his contribution to sports. That year, he also entered the semi-finals of the Commonwealth Games. His former colleagues at the State Bank of India, fellow table-tennis players and students recall—with nostalgia and sorrow—Chandra’s soft-spoken ways, his gritty courage and superb skills at table-tennis. In Chandra’s passing, India has lost a real life hero and sporting legend.
Prof. Dinesh Mohan—Road Safety Expert and Civil Rights Activist
As with many Covid-19 victims, death came as a surprise visitor in late May 2021 to Dinesh Mohan. The IIT-Delhi Honorary Professor and one of India’s foremost road safety experts had been hospitalized in the third week of April, but appeared to be recovering when he succumbed to cardiac arrest. It was a horribly familiar tale across the city’s hospitals this summer.
The U.S. and IIT-Bombay educated engineer is credited with groundbreaking changes in motorcycle design during his career. As a member of several national road safety committees, he focused on road design for the most vulnerable users—pedestrians, bike users and motorcyclists, who typically get short shrift in India’s chaotic traffic. To Mohan, road safety was primarily a human issue where lives could be imperilled by poor design thinking.
Mohan’s views on public transport and road use were frequently controversial. He strongly opposed the Delhi Metro as an expensive transport option; neither did he endorse the introduction of CNG for public transport vehicles, contending that it would increase carcinogens in the atmosphere.
Mohan was equally known for his espousal of human rights issues. He was one of the founders of the Pakistan-India Forum for Peace and Democracy in 1994 and a familiar face in People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) meetings and the South Asian Forum for Human Rights.
If you happen to stroll along one of New Delhi’s smooth, tree-lined avenues, spare a salute to Prof. Dinesh Mohan.
Poornima Narayanan is a Delhi-based freelance copy editor and writer. Her interests include films, culinary experiments and travel.
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