A recently issued government notification for Delhi – a stunningly overpopulated city of 32,941,000 people – informs them that in view of the intense activities involving many VIPs during the three-day G20 Summit, from September 8 to 10, the city must go into a close down. That means all Delhi government and private offices, educational institutions, including schools and colleges, will remain closed for three days.In the New Delhi district, furthermore, as per Section 16(3)(i) of the Delhi Shops and Establishments Act, 1954, all banks, financial institutions and commercial establishments will also remain closed. A TV channel, ABP Live, portal said that not only Lutyens Delhi, but Old Delhi markets may also remain closed.Along with this, major roads the VIPs will be using during the Summit will also be unavailable to citizens’ vehicles, barring ambulances. The citizens are advised to stay indoors during the period to avoid congestion and/or being penalised by traffic authorities if caught.Important questions from the traders’ bodies have since been flowing out: all high-powered delegations arrive with VIP wives. Wives want to shop and visit exotic tourist spots, savour local food while their men discuss global affairs of war, peace, international trade and other such stuff. If this closing down plan is put into operation, how will they be able to do any of these things in our grand shopping malls, or Chandni Chowk, Karol Bagh, Khan Market, Sarojini Nagar, Kamala Nagar and/or many other such places? Oh, the brains within the bureaucracy will doubtless do some “jugaad” and see to it that the shoppers can shop and the others are stopped from crossing their paths to markets, Shanti Vana, National Museum et al. They always do.To understand the disastrous lockdown of a vast heart that an ancient city is, one needs to remember the sharp couplet of poet Jayasi about Khilji Sultan’s victory of Chittor that left silent mounds of bricks and ashes in a city of the dead. Way back in 1989, this writer had a taste of such desolation. A delegation of Indian writers U.R. Anant Murthy, Viren Bhattacharya, Gopichand Narang and myself landed in Beijing on June 4 due to some diplomatic oversights. We were immediately driven in army vans to our hotel where we spent the next fortnight as privileged but locked up state guests.What followed is history. There were no air raids, no ‘pacification’ efforts, no bulldozing of public buildings, cemeteries or squares. But you sensed a vast fear hovering overhead like a vulture and slowly the revolt dying the way an oasis dies, when all natural wells and springs feeding it are stoppered.It was on the mounds and ashes from that closing down by Deng’s government, that the China of Xi has arisen powerful, confident, combative. A nation with vast ambitions radically distinct from the West.If you are a writer of whatever stripe, at some point you are asked why at such moments you writers do not break through the cordon and go sit out there in solidarity with the crowds? The simplest and most honest answer is, because only a delusional writer works furiously through such times to produce what he or she expects to be radically transformative of a vast country without being close to its psychology or everyday life. Frankly, the people demanding radical socio-political change, demand not creative writing but manifestos, of their writers.In the last 75 years in Hindi literary circles, there have been naïve attempts to connect the artists’ work with the hard work put in by the truly labouring and grossly underpaid working classes. But to me the relationship then and even now between their demands and our capacity to write, remains somewhat tenuous. So writing quickies about the COVID-19 years or the plight and pain of those that work and are paid daily by the clock when a city is closed down for foreign delegates, may be easy but inadvisable. That effort needs time, a vast canvas and a deep understanding of the past 75 years.We see, time and again, that the vast working classes and craftsmen of India are affected very differently from those who create art objects for the delegates to buy or present a sanitized version of traditional Indian dancing, music, and drama while they are feasted upon in Hyderabad House or the mansions of the State. If there is a collective need Indians have, it is to assess the damage done to the labouring classes and small shopkeepers during the lockdown, it must be done separately from the ones that participated in the grand Summit as “The Face of India”.They are two separate categories and must not be mixed together with those whose shanties are hidden behind vast plastic sheets, even though they have been beautifying the city and putting up art displays for the VIP visitors for months. They are the ones who have stencilled the age-old doctrine of “Vasudhaiv Kutumbakam”, that the leadership will be verbally describing to the guests.The middle-class writers will not greatly mind being cut off for three days. Their children take the break in their stride using the Internet to pass time, win friends and send out Instagram posts. The writers actually are quite used to being alone, and with extra time on their hands, thinking things through with clarity and grace enhanced. The heat, the confusion, fear and unrelenting tension of a country tragically divided by old and new fault lines hits the minorities, the labouring classes and daily wagers (often they are the one and the same) the hardest. Those who must live behind the plastic sheet and tarpaulin covered Bustees in the humid weather, their lanes choked with plastic and flammable waste and wandering cows. If someone’s wife goes into labour, or a child has lungs choked with phlegm, if there is, god forbid, a short circuit or a stove catches fire in some drunk’s kitchen, or the cow vigilantes come threatening, who do they call? Where do they go ?Forget Delhi, where did the people in Nuh go? Or in Manipur?An ex-bureaucrat on TV was known to be an upright worker and a stickler for rules when he was in the saddle. He has since greyed but been re-employed in a very different capacity for a very important project slated to be completed by early next year. The chair he sits in is a magnificent burnished throne. The wall of books behind him has the usual Gandhian Charkha and Ganesha and sundry holy statues. As a journalist, one admired his handling of India’s modernisation very efficiently across the states. He was then gruff, unapproachable, and like most Delhi bureaucrats of his vintage, dismissive of Hindi journalists. Today he has a caste mark, a holy ritual thread on his wrist and a ring with a large stone on his pinkie. He is speaking about ‘The Project’ in flawless Hindi to his interlocutor and smiles like a benign saint. Things are going smoothly, he says. God willing, the project will be ready on time. Would the delegates be visiting his site ? He says he does not know and smiles.Out of sheer habit, one feels like asking him details. How? What does divine intervention have to do with the completion of the project? Is he sure God will oblige? But such questions will go unanswered or else he will come up with some fables and quotes on leadership likely to diminish both him and the anchor. You switch off.