A few weeks ago the Prime Minister visited private companies involved with the formulation of Covid-19 vaccine. And as I write, farmers of Punjab (and other states) are massed on the borders of Delhi in protest against the three agricultural Acts passed last year. One of their concerns is the Acts will leave them vulnerable to the negotiating heft of large corporates. To dramatise their concern, they have called for boycott of Reliance Jio in Punjab. Some miscreant sympathisers have even vandalised Jio phone towers.
These two incidents have helped me frame the contents of this article. I will admit I have struggled somewhat. I did not want my first article of 2021—after a year when ‘everything changed’—to be one more piece on the consequential economic and social implications of the pandemic. That would have been one too many. Fortunately, the above incidents provided the prompts and I decided to draw on them (and my…