INDEPENDENCE DAY: NEERJA DASANI
Neerja Dasani is a freelance writer with a post-graduate degree in journalism. She is currently living in Chennai and working with a web-based encyclopedia on culture. She writes regularly on media culture, literature and current affairs. The poem 'Independence Day - 2012' is a homage to migrant workers in India, especially those from the Northeast, whose struggles go unnoticed by the very people who depend on their labour.
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This poem is a response to what is being termed the 'North-East exodus' that took place around the Indian Independence Day and forced us to confront the notion of nationhood itself.
They all decided to leave today:
The cervical, the thoracic, the lumbar and the nerve-wracked cord.
All parts of this hole-ridden whole.
They took the first train back to their fractured homes.
They spent most of their lives with us
And yet we turned our backs on them.
To us they’re foreigners from somewhere in the back of beyond.
All they’re good for is the back-breaking work no one else will do,
At rates that no one else could live on.
Back in the day this was called discrimination.
Now it’s known as the spirit of enterprise.
Their issues, their struggles, their insecurities,
Must always remain on the back burner.
And now us spineless folk, we wonder,
While counting the cost of labour lost –
When will they be back?
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