Did you keep quiet?

One day years later, the next generation will ask us.

Were you there when there was blood spilled on the tracks?

Did you keep quiet while poor people were dying?

While men walked hundreds of kilometres with kids on their backs?

What did you do, when the great pandemic struck?

What difference did you in life make?

Did you stand up and demand for justice?

Or did you write it off as a mistake?

Did you see poor migrants paying for tickets,

While the rich people flew for free?

Did you watch the mockery made of democracy?

Were you there when justice ceased to be?

Wash our hands with the strongest sanitizer we may,

But the blood will never ever wash away.

What happened to those people walking on the tracks.

Was one of India’s darkest days.

When a child collapses from walking exhausted,

He is after all collateral damage, a small price to pay.

They were anyway clogging up our streets,

They serve no purpose in our cities, jobless as they are today.

We forget the man who stepped into our gutters,

Cleaned our shit so that we may breathe clean air.

We forget the people who built our high rises by hand.

The woman who provided our children daily care.

This is a temporarily blip, solved by switching channels,

After all, ‘make in India’ will heal all that happened today.

And worry not today if they have no food to eat,

Tomorrow they too can sip on some ‘turmeric latte’

-P R