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Remembering Nehru

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“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 gate.
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.

May 27, 2014         Badri Raina


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