Eleven young souls in some place better
Words flow down as eyes get wetter
Details of bombs, numbers or some other
The residue always has a clueless mother
Clueless, for it’s unfair in times of opportunity
Some gone, some left with strange immunity
Immunity to what does not affect us
Someone else’s bakery, someone else’s bus.
On the bus, we did talk about the bombs
Solar systems and political storms
The good leaders condemned the ghastly act
The sum of a mother’s tears a small fact
The police will catch the cowards one day
The courts will ask “What do you have to say”
They will rant on and on for a year or two
As networks flash stills from Pune and Kathmandu
Then one day the judge will have enough
Hang him high, the coward claims to be tough
But the application will stay somewhere in a file
A mother waits all this while.
A plane will get hijacked ten years from now
As cowards fly away, we will shout and not bow
We do not give into cowards
We just don’t give a damn, actually
God, let me turn this around a bit
Not that anyone should be hurt or hit
But what if in that bakery there had been a Minister’s Son
This country would act, things would be done
Forget the Minister, what if my child was there
Then I may know what is fair and unfair
What if the media had lost one of their own?
Images of blood and flesh would not be shown
For every viewer who is fascinated with mayhem
India TV, there is a anxious mother waiting in pain
She prays her daughter is not in that café
She prays she is busy learning ballet
An Army waits for marching orders
Some inside us, some on the borders
We have had enough, we always had enough
Let us be tough, and not act tough
Every Indian life is more than your compensation
Let us break those caves, before they break this nation
We are ready to go back in our economy along the way
The price of war is less than this price we pay
A German bakery today, a Swedish bus tomorrow
Eleven today, a hundred tomorrow
Let’s kill the immunity we all have inside
Not eleven, but that day another billion died.
(This beautiful and heart-touching poem came to me in a forward, and is composed by Gaurav Parab.)
Hi Ankush,
ReplyDeleteGaurav Parab blogs at Gaurav Parab Says
http://www.gaurav-parab.blogspot.com/
And the link to the poem can be found at:
http://gaurav-parab.blogspot.com/2010/02/indian-bakery.html
Although he is very particular about Copyright, knowing him and how he feels about this particular problem I am sure he is ok with this particular poem on your blog. However, do check with him first. Perhaps a link to his blog should be all right.
You are right, it is a beautiful poem by perhaps the only writer I know who can straddle humor, poetry and hard hitting columns with ease.
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