An empty riverbed is like a carnivore’s maw
Waiting to gulp the sky or the first bird to fall in its womb…
This is where all human forms of inequalities stand unmasked, waterless, shamefully…
And there,
He sits alone,
Looking inwards,
At a gaping hole inside his stomach
It’s almost like his barren land, filled with dried up desires and cracked up dreams with no sign of crop or hope!
The sheer emptiness mirrors the riverbed’s hunger
Echoes of his family wailing, carrying their cross of invalid existence oozes up to the brim of his humility,
There,
He loses his sense of faith, of his religion, and his dignity
At the intersection of India’s neglected reality…
Many lives lose their worth…
Naked and famished like a helpless wasp
He has no choice but to think
Of biting a piece of death…
And so he falls
Into the abyss with a certain finality and vengeance promising himself never to come back…
Neither as a crop or as a drop of hope!
This happens frequently just about a few 100 kilometres away from an indifferent civilisation mired in progress and probabilities of becoming a super power state! With people wearing t-shirts that say “Being Human”. Approximately 63,000 farmers have committed suicide in the state of Maharashtra. These who suffer most are the poor landless farmers.
Nirav Vaidya wrote this poem after listening to P. Sainath at a writers’ conference in 2016.
