Mainstream WeeklySay Kudos to the Slumdog
– From your underbelly’s
– Bloody rotting open wound.
– All the glamour, razzmatazz,
– Glitz and red fluff
– Cannot take away the stink
– Because Hunger does not
– Wait for your trickle down
– Because Faith does not
– Wait for your life to ebb away
– Because Breath does not
– Wait for your gaping maggots to multiply.
Let the golden statuettes
– Be put away as they were
– After Gandhi and Ray’s
– Last Song of the Road
– —Pather Shesh Panchali.
– For us the barricades are up now
– Because you have no answer
– To our suffering
– Because you have locked away
– The keys to our dreams
– In your mortuary’s forensic lab
– Where our aspirations are bottled
– In small formalin jars of amnesia
– While our daily survival grind
– Pushes us to forget
– Where the bodies of thousands
– Upon thousands of our children
– Are embalmed in your pyramids
– Of putrid moth-eaten time frames
– Of five-year plans pegged to
– Some statistician’s shifting BPL
– Which if need arises can even be
– Dismissed as ‘grandiose’
– Because only you can splurge
– While we starve.
But one day very soon will come
– When our scars will grow tongues
– Unscathed to invert those pyramids
– When we will liberate ourselves
– When we will give ourselves
– What is truly ours!
– Jai Ho! Jai Ho!
New Delhi, Suhas Borker
– February 23, 2009
[Suhas Borker is an independent documentary filmmaker and convener of the Working Group on Alternative Strategies based in New Delhi. He can be
e-mailed at subasborker@gmail.com]