When scars grow tongues

Say 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]