As the World Health Organization's declaration of a global Ebola emergency rippled outward from Central Africa, India quietly mobilized its airports into a network of watchful gates. Gujarat, anchoring the nation's most active screening effort, processed nearly three thousand travelers in a span of weeks — part of a broader national count approaching eleven thousand — all without a single confirmed case crossing its borders. The response reflects a recurring human instinct: to draw a careful line between the world's dangers and one's own threshold, using knowledge of incubation windows and tra