Sunday, December 30, 2012

I know that all of us are really shattered with the brutal atrocity on Damini. Like you all, I am not the left-out one. I have been constantly composing poems about the atrocity on Indian women's insecurity. The poem below, had been posted in Facebook>


To One and All (with due apologies to Mark Anthony)

Friends, Indians, countrymen, lend me your ears;     
I come to bury the 23-year-old girl, not to praise rape.
The evil that men do lives after them;
the good is oft interred with their bones;
so let it be with Damini, the twenty-three year old.
All of you know that she was returning by bus
from a late-night movie show.
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
and grievously has she answered it.
Here, under leave of the laws of your country--
for the laws are honourable;
so are all the law-makers, all honourable men--
come I to speak against injustice.
She was young, pretty and studying paramedics:
but the six men say she was over-ambitious;
and that her youth-hood was what drove them to rape her.

She wore a smile which captivated her boy friend
and her smiles filled his heart:
Did this in her seem over-ambitious?
When she cried, she rested her head on his shoulders;
over -ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet the six say she was over-ambitious;
and the laws of the land are honourable;
so are all the law-makers, all honourable men.
You all do know she and her boyfriend boarded the bus at 10:15 pm.
was that a wrong time to travel?
Yet the six say she was over-ambitious;
and, sure, they are honourable men.
I speak not to disprove the laws of your country,
but here I speak what I do know and what you know.

You all did love your country once by throwing the British out;
and that was not without a cause:
What cause withholds you then, to redress your country?
O judgment! You have fled to brutish beasts,
and the country has lost her reason.
My countrymen, all our hearts are with the 23-year-old,
so let me pause till they come back to us.