Thursday, March 24, 2016

Far better to be savages than to be humans like you

Another milestone
The end of these two years
With people you didn't become friends with
But became familiar nonetheless
When you arrived, you were so self-absorbed
with your aching heart and your little girl dreams
The world has spun a few hundred times since then
Spring has come and gone
You have spiralled into a brave new world
You have dared to raise your voice
which you should have raised all those wasted years of the past
Mostly people you didn't punch in the face
Mostly the times you ignored indignities
or forgave them because they were friends,
excused them their racism, their impunity,
their coal black hearts and their empty minds.
You will never do that again.
They always tell you not to carry hate in your heart
But that is only for the privileged ones
Never having endured social-historical insults all their lives
How would they know what we go through?
To know that our memories had been wiped quite clean
systematically through education
This country doesn't care for the millions of adivasis
whose land is forcibly taken away and sold to corporates,
They only care for eleven men winning a match.
Because it is no longer alright to look away
To be complicit in this vicious terrible silence
This brahmin raj calls us savages, barbarians, uncivilised
But far better to be savages than to be humans like you.

Thursday, March 3, 2016

The generation that loses its humanity

You have so much unlearning to do
Starting from history to norms of beauty
Which you have internalised
It is a beautiful day today
but the world hangs heavy
What you own is truly not yours
The language you speak and think in
This religion is not yours, please
put it away
What good is a country to you
that doesn't recognise you as its own?
What good is all the history of the world
when you are ignorant of your own?
How can you fight against one form of
oppression and not against others?
your whole generation, young men
and women, unable to think beyond what
is told to them, beyond the glamour of their
own lives and their future,
unable to empathise for the lot of humanity
Maybe we are the lost generation,
the generation which loses its humanity.