I sigh,
As the years pass from the green to the golden
Of my country, that travels
From a colonial past,
To some kind of modern.
But I wince,
As the young and idle, scream outside mosques,
To find more and more temples,
For a lost lonely Ram,
Who couldn’t find a temple in their hearts.
I wince,
When a frail old man in a skull cap,
Is mocked by young men in rowdy swagger.
As they pull at his grey beard,
Cant they see their grandfather?
I wince,
As millions take a reverent dip,
In a holy river, by sin made unholy.
Chaos, stampedes and VIPs,
A civilization falling, and not so slowly.
I wince
As three hundred year old graves
Are sought to be desecrated,
By people who are goaded
Into hatred, contrived, ill-fated.
I wince,
No money, no food, no medicine,
No education, no skill, no job,
Pushes the poor man into
Religion, caste and Hindu-rashtra?
I wince,
As more and more people shout
And others become more and more silent,
A nation that loses equilibrium,
The rulers smile and the police turns violent.
I wince,
For how long will we be divided,
By our food, our clothes, our God?
Yet whenever a loved one is killed
We shed the same tears of blood and salt.
I wince,
For we’ll fight about ‘us’ and ‘them’
Till vultures claw us both to death.
And will only in death we really know
They were ‘us’ and we were ‘them’?
