“Milton! Thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters….we are selfish men;
O raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.” —William Wordsworth
When you died, without notice, from
A heavy heart, I was twenty three, but
Cried all day long, uncontrollably.
It felt as though our umbilical cord
Had been severed from that infinitely
Caring , infinitely daring, infinitely
Childlike god who had steered a riven
Ship full of chaos, cacophony, woe—
A babble of skins, syllables, rituals
Caverns of fear-ridden ignorance,
Hate-filled hunger, and suspicion
Of what we did not know, which
Was indeed head to toe—
So adroitly,— resolute in love, sure
In reason, all-embracing in clasp,—
That the vessel , guaranteed
To sink into smithereens, steadied,
Cleaved, charted a course yielding,
Without force, a common route
To a common fate, neither rampant
Nor flamboyant, but erect in gait.
You left, beloved of us all, and
Of an admiring world, and soon
We came into our own. This is not
Enough, some said; dismantle
Now this socialist rot, and let the rich
Be richer and the others strive
In their poverty to merit our company.
For decades you have been a memory
Even to your own, secretly, of what has
Kept us from those animal spirits which alone
Can bloat what was a common ark
To the size of a battle ship, ready
To embark on conquering the world,
Even as we poison the earth, air, water
Around us to make demons of humans,
Armed with lolling avarice and righteous
Intolerance, vanquishing mere kindness, and
The timidity of peace. Our treasury grows
As we shrink into munching midgets
And mechanical mannequins, replete
With silliness, vacuity, aggression, and pose,
All stridently garnished with religion and noise.
Jawahar that you truly were, our gems
Now are made from synthetic things.
The least trinket with a brand does
The highest price command. In such
A Bharat may be even you could not have
Done much. You taught us to be global
In the best human ways; our globalization
After you is a branded craze for thinginesses
That have flattened our souls into dresses,
And filled our skulls with buying and selling
To the accompaniment of twittered yelling.
To them who can neither buy nor sell
We simply say there is heaven and there is hell,
And never the two may gel. You will
Not pull us down, and we will not pull
You up; be you green or dark, and
Speaking out of turn, beware of the trident
That bears the blazing fury of saffron.
There we have arrived, O noble one,
Best gone, where you never failed to warn.
May be the catastrophe will impel us
To return to the riches of reason you so
Strenuously taught us to learn.
May be the tear that now drips down
My cheek is harbinger of that churn.
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