This will come as a surprise to no one who has lived in India for more than a week or so: We have no respect for the lives of others. That fact was brought home more forcefully than usual in the days after COVID-19 began making its dangerous way among us. What prompted communities and people in thousands of places around the world to come together, quickly became an excuse for some of us to exploit the less fortunate. While some people chose to be better, many simply looked the other way.

Nowhere was this more obvious than in the healthcare industry, where one could almost hear the owners of private hospitals rub their hands in glee at the prospect of doling out a stream of inflated bills far into the foreseeable future. Media reports began to trickle in, then quickly flood our timelines, documenting instances of patients being declared ill even when they were not, or declared healthy even when they were not, all because someone, somewhere, wanted to turn tragedy into profit. Even the dead weren't spared until medical bills had been cleared, but that didn't shock us either.