Many years ago,
I saw a man in uniform,
Get down on one knee,
Peacefully,
And fire upon a crowd of protestors,
Fleeing into narrow lanes of ghettos,
As if their only crime was to come out of oblivion,
And protest their exclusion,
And bullets were needed to throw them back,
Into their desolate lives, excluded.
A few were shot- all on their backs,
I later learned a student died,
I was a student in the ghetto,
I had learned a lot,
and survived.
---
Somehow recalled the above lines on seeing the movie Hotel Rwanda (rare movie recommendation on this site). The lines just came to me sometime last year, recounting a real-life incident I had witnessed more than a decade ago.
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On the poetic sensibility, in its many manifestations
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- Siyaah
- "Fard-e-amal Siyaah kiye ja raha hoon main, Rahmat ko bepanaah kiye ja raha hoon main": Blackening life's canvas of deeds to the extreme, It is I who expand divine compassion to the limitless.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
6 comments:
I was picturing Jallianwala Bagh and towards the end the poem suddenly turned very individual, and probably more tragic. Good to read.
Very touching.
I could relate to it. I have seen it too. the men in uniform, the crush of angry bodies in the narrow bylanes, the shots and then the panic.
was too young to understand ... the horror of it all
vibhav: yes, the sudden individual turn just came to me- hadnt thought of it at the start. Also, it creates an interesting ambiguity: who really was the student who "died"? and what did he "learn"? Was it different parts of the individual narrator that died and survived?
phoenix: thanks.
arfi: so true.
I like this, crisp, concise. It's beautiful and terrible.
To me it seemed like the student lost his identity as a student, thus "dying". As if beyond that experience he had nothing more to learn.
Interesting blog you have, I drop by off and on.
j: thanks for dropping by and for the comment. you have articulated the interpretation so well. and you have an interesting blog too.
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