Voracious reader turned crisis commander
It is December – so our readers definitely deserve something special. After all, 2023 was the year when we could finally forget about COVID and life as we knew it returned to normal.
And just like other landmarks in history, such as the partition of India or the Berlin Wall, COVID spawned copious amounts of literature – both fiction and non-fiction. Economists like Scott Galloway gave us the insightful ‘Crisis to Opportunity.’ There’s also ’Survival of the city: Living and Thriving in an Age of Isolation’ authored by urbanists Edward Glaeser and David Cutter. These and many other books are what we might turn to, as we look back over the years and tell future generations about ‘those lockdown days’.
‘COVID Warrior’ written by Minhaz Merchant is more of a no-holds barred account of an execution-man. Instead of reviewing the book like we always do, we decided to mix things up a bit and get up close and personal with two time doctorate Dr.Iqbal Singh Chahal, Commissioner Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, the determined face of Mumbai’s emergence from COVID. Of course a book of this nature has to be cleared by the Government itself and therein lies a thumping validation of the famed ‘Mumbai model’- most global cities pale in comparison to the population density and size that Chahal was handling!
“I was a bookworm in school and college”, he says earnestly. “Despite being a B Tech in electronics and computer science, the subject I took for my IAS was History. It gave me a chance to learn from the past.”
Well put because here’s a man who was looking for literature on how the Spanish flu of the 1920s was dealt with, as COVID dawned upon us. Notwithstanding this, somewhere between 2020 and 2021, Chahal ran 52 half marathons in 52 weeks, never contracting COVID himself.
There is a fair emphasis on rigorous study when he talks about how he went about designing the 29 sub-models within the now famous Mumbai model. “You should be able to read to improve yourself professionally. I still remember my father, an army officer, talking about how we lost to China because we were not well prepared. COVID was nothing short of war! I had an army of one hundred and fifty thousand officers in the BMC and we prepared tremendously to succeed.”
He looks back fondly at over three decades in the civil services as one of immense satisfaction, having been anointed something of a go-to crisis management specialist. He also has anecdotes to share about Kumaramangalam Birla asking his workforce to read COVID Warrior as a practitioners’ guide on how to deal with a crisis. Set in ten chapters, the book also features a letter by Lou Correa, Member of the United States Congress which triggers memories of the frenzy of oxygen requirements, masks and vaccinations that had consumed our minds, conversations and obsessions less than a year ago!
Wait, was it that recent?
Reeta Ramamurthy Gupta is a columnist and bestselling biographer. She is credited with the internationally acclaimed Red Dot Experiment, a decadal six-nation study on how ‘culture impacts communication.’ On Instagram @OfficialReetaGupta