Why should you come knocking at my door? - A poem - Day #15 (8 April 2020) 21 day #Covid19 Lock down

Day #15 (8 April 2020)

Why should you come knocking at my door? - A poem

I am a good man, lived my life in full,

played cricket, went to college, smoked,

abused my mentors,

burnt flags, buried my past,

ate meat in different lands,

animals, dead and alive,

spent on the gods,

drank the cheap wine,

kneaded legs, lived on the bones,

savoured the curves,

whoever, wherever,

the normal way,

till i tripped on one,

and created another...

future curve.

Am I not a good man, a normal man?

Why should you come knocking at my door?

I am a good man, led by the cuffs,

that tell nothing, but lies!

I did not kill them, I did not need them, at all.

The dark smoke did the job.

I was also engulfed, inside, outside,

they all died, I only smoked, the dark.

I refuse to die, I did not even deny. I am too minted.

The four walls, no...,

the three walls, and the iron rod window,

the smell of my own waste,

Minted, I don’t belong there.

The cuffs are lies, I only smoked, the dark.

I did not kill them, they died!

The cuffs, they are lies; I am telling you.

Am I am not a good man? the cuffs, they are lies!

Why should you come knocking at my door?

I am a good man, I stand before the world,

I look great, I am great.

They all know me, watch me,

love me, hate me, fear me, the great,

and yet, nobody, dare me.

I stand up against the mike, tells me,

speak, and I speak,

the words. I don’t have words,

I spit, and the world

reads them.

Nobody dare me, NO, I have

guns, bombs, missiles, warplanes, I

never use, the nuclear drop, never.

I stand against a mike, I spit.

Nobody dares me.

Am I not a good man? the spit is on the other.

Why should you come knocking at my door?

I am a good man, I don’t live.

The squalor, there is my walls, far away somewhere,

I work, I sweat, I beg, I thole, I endure

humiliation, my bread.

The worse, the better I bring home, bread.

I am alone, the little screen is my window,

reminds me of my woman,

any woman, if not.

The dented plate, is food,

any food.

Then, all of a sudden,

this night, I see him spit.

I rush to the streets, then the roads, the highways,

a million souls on cracked legs, hundred kilometers, three days...

Atlast, home in the dust,

she rushes to me, bare, worn look,

no smiles, no love, I come empty,

she is full. Her wait is done.

Two monkeys on her shoulders, scream out,

“Father!”, I step aside, the Virus!

The door is open, it was never there,

Am I not a good man? without even a door!

Why should you come knocking at my hole?

The curtain falls.

Silence, waiting for the crackle of the mike.

It’s a heavy voice, coughing, feverish

but pure voice, a million years old.

“I have come”, a moment goes,

“The normal does not matter, I have come.

The cuffs do not matter, neither lie not truth, I have come.

The spit does not matter, neither on you or the other, I have come.

The door does not matter, I don’t come knocking. I just come.”

And turning to the wise, “Were you not warned? Did you not hear me before?”

“In the Synagogue in Nazareth?

In the Mount as-Safa?

In Sarnath?

In the Tolstoy Farm, in Sabarmathi Ashram?”

“Did you not hear me through the Dervish, the deep trance of the Baul?

Did you not hear me through the Jinn’s and the Avadooths, ah! You thought they were all mad!”

“And that profound letter of the Si’ahl Chief, you have never heeded.”

“I didn’t come knocking at your door. You wished it.”

The End.

"Guest Labourers" - Day #7 (31 March 2020) - 21 day #Covid19 Lock down

Day #7 (31 March 2020)

“Guest labourers”

The Migrant workers are fleeing back home ! They call it reverse-migration. Everywhere in the world, Covid19 has caused probably the largest movement of migrants ever. Infact, it’s not the fear of the Covid19, but the lock down that has suddenly left them stranded without homes, food, jobs, salary and even basic necessities in the cities that they came to with the hope of building their lives. Most of them who came were not driven by the aspiration to emigrate and settle there, like many of our well-to-do settlers in developed nations. They left their villages because their villages were losing it’s future. They did not see the design, they only saw the effect. And millions left their homes, painfully, to work in the cities, make their daily money and build their lives. I remember a poem, I once read and am not able to trace it now. Nevertheless, I think it begins with these words “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark”.

Madhan was a migrant labourer. He was from Assam, some where on the banks of the River Brahmaputra. He did tell me the name of his village, but I have a poor memory. What I remember is his graphic description of the floods, when the Brahmaputra rises, and their fields of paddy get flooded, sometimes leaving their crop damaged. He was part of a team of five workers from Assam who stayed in our land in Karakulam, when I was building my house. Madhan worked with a contractor, associated with COSTFORD, an alternate building group in Kerala. COSTFORD was established by the master designer and eco-construction pioneer Laurie Baker. These workers had become experts in mud-based construction. Today, I proudly live in a mud and bamboo home, and I owe it all to these excellent workers, as much as I owe it to the Engineers and Architects who did the designs and supervised the work.

Madhan and team stayed in my land for nearly five months, in a make-shift shed. When the day’s work was over, I sometimes joined them in their evening tea. They always made black tea. Once in a while, I brought them some hot snacks to eat. This always made them happy, and made me a benevolent employee ! One day, over a glass of tea, Madhan said, “We are so grateful to you. We are poor people. It’s because rich people like you are building such houses that we get job, and are able to look after our family”. I asked him, “Your family?”. He said, “I live with my father and mother. My wife and two children are there with them. I go home once or twice every year”. I asked him, “But what were you doing there, before you came here; you must have had some job?”. “We are farmers”, he replied, and pointed to two of his relatives who were also in the team. “Ah!”, that interested me. It was too tempting ! I did a complete interview, unstructured, free-wheeling...and here is their story

Madhan and his family owns 20 acres of paddy land between his father, himself and his brothers. He alone has 6 acres. They were not small farmers by Indian standards ! The flood plains of Brahmaputra is one of the most fertile, and he told me that their land yielded 5 to 6 tonnes of paddy per acre, in a good year. Did I hear it right ? Acre ? Yes. This is super-bumper crop. I did a quick calculation; that makes 30 Tonnes of paddy and at the then minimum procurement rate of the Food Corporation of India which was around Rs 15 per kilo, he could easily get Rs 4.5 lakh / year. I asked him, “Why are you here ? Why are you doing this in Kerala” ? All this hardship, 3500 kms away from your village ?” He refuted my figures. He said they only get Rs 5-6 per kilo of paddy. “Some buyers come to our village and offer only this much. We have no choice. We sell”. That was just one-third of what they are entitled to. This is the Shark ! This is village in India ! A 6-acre farmer, migrates 3500 kms away, comes to a 21 cent Engineer, calls him rich, and works as a labourer in his building !! The irony of a cruel nation ! The design of making a migrant labourer out of a rich farmer !!

All migrant labourers are not Madhans. But each of them had a life and a livelihood, or atleast a possibility of a livelihood before he or she became a migrant labourer. Many of them may have had a history of prosperity, in their families, in their villages. Otherwise, we would never have been taught that “Villages are the backbone of India” or “Villages are the Pride of the nation” and so on. But in just 7 decades of growth that India planned and executed for itself, we have killed the villages !. The last two decades has been the worst !! Today, villages are more known for the extreme poverty and the suicide of farmers, as much as it’s still know for never letting this nation down on food security. What an irony !

Moreover, the way migrants were handled in this crisis exposed two different attitudes. One, entrenched in the relics of a feudal past, the nation threw lakhs of them into the highways, forced them to walk hundreds of kilometres to their villages, and when that shamed the nation, we herded them into buses ( during Covid19 times !) and sent them packing. We even sprayed chemicals on them to disinfect them, as we do floors and even animals, and later apologised to the nation ! On the other hand, we saw in Kerala, my home state, a Chief Minister instructing his officers that the migrant labourers demands be handled in a dignified manner.We set up 4000 odd camps, moved 1.5 lakh labourers into the camps, ensured food of their choice through community kitchens, and even provided cable TV for entertainment, to keep them engaged during the lock down. The CM even coined a new name for them. In Kerala, now we call them “Guest labourers” !.

Nevertheless, Migration of this nature can never be an indicator of prosperity or growth, as is sometimes justified by archaic economists and planners. Migration, especially from the rural to the urban, is a disease in itself, as serious as a Covid19. The disease needs a vaccine. Migration also demands a political vaccine, a revolutionary change in the way we conceive and build our societies, its relationships and its economic function !

After word :

While I was musing over the migrant issue for this day’s writing, Devinder Sharma, one of India’s best analyst of the rural sector, wrote a hard hitting and analytical opinion which is enlightening, and needs to be read - “Why the long march home?” https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/comment/why-the-long-march-home-819476.html

"No other way" - Day #1 (25 March 2020) - 21 day #Covid19 Lock down

Day #1 (25 March 2020)

"No other way"

Yesterday, the unexpected eventually happened. At 8 pm, the Prime Minister of India appeared on TV and announced a 21 day complete lock down of the country. This was unprecedented. Its never happened in our lifetime, nor of our parents, nor our grandparents. Probably, never. He went on to explain why the lock down and how deep is the crisis. He said “we have no other way”. Everybody has to be isolated and distanced from each other, social distancing will ensure breaking the chain of the spread of the virus. Life will never be the same after the Covid19, many believe. But how many of us will be the same, even after the Covid19 crisis that has hit humanity like never before. I wonder. Not one nation seems to have been spared, not one caste, creed, religion, colour, status, age, sex; seems to have any immunity against this seemingly-flu like virus. It does look like a very even-handed virus, a socialist one, a leveler ! Yes, almost like we would expect God to be, or even Governments to be, and lost hope that both would ever be. God, as we know him or her or it, has never been even-handed. So, haven't Governments. That, we know. There are Gods and Governments that help people prosper, but a selected few of them. How else do we explain the fact Oxfam recently found. In their report 'Time to Care' they found that the world's 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than the 4.6 billion people who make up 60 per cent of the planet's population. That translates to 0.000027% of people holding more money that 60% of the world. Earlier in 2017, they found that 73% of the wealth generated in India went to the richest 1%, while 67 million Indians who comprise the poorest half of the population saw only a 1% increase in their wealth. In such a world, how even-handed would this leveler be ? And how would an equally leveling decree of a 21 day lock down be ?


The Covid19, which is a strain of the SARS-Cov2, which is a type of Corona Virus, can host itself in some animals and human beings as well. It seems to have jumped out of an animal and found the human host, possibly because some human consumed the animal which hosted this virus. It's a freak accident with some human help, in the whole play of ecology, on which we shall dwell later.
So, coming to the socialism of the virus. As I said, this virus seems to be more impartial than any other. And at the time of writing this sentence, the world has seen 4,28,243 people affected, 19,101 dead and has spread to 194 countries and territories across the world. And there are 195 countries in the world today. Then, you would ask me which is that one nation which has not been affected. Probably, the one with the least indulgence in globalisation, I guess!

Today morning, like all mornings, started with hot tea and biscuits soaked in tea. Surrounding me were the three newspapers that has become habit – the Hindu, which is an inheritance; Mathrubhumi, which gives the local news and my wife prefers; and Deshabhimani, because the party members in my ward, selected me as a subscriber (please dont frown, I paid for it !). Every page, except the obituary columns and the sports pages, were just Covid19, and everything else was also connected to Covid19. The virus was like a superstar – a qualification, when only Covid19 stories sell, and any other story sells if you have a Covid19 in guest appearance at the least!!.

One news stood out and speaks of that which we never see, and would never wish to see happen. It was a very small news tucked away in a corner of one of the vernaculars. A woman and a child were killed in a forest fire, and three others seriously burnt, when the family was attempting to cross the forests on foot, from Kerala to Tamilnadu, so as to reach their village before the borders shut down. These were farm workers in the plantations in Idukki, and as everything came to a standstill, they probably wanted to get back to their village. The village, home, is where all those crores of workers who have crossed state borders and are daily-wages across India, would want to run away to, especially when a debilitating crisis hits them. The two deaths was only a bizarre accident. The death ensured that it gets reported. But does it end with a news like this ? No. Is it just these two deaths ? No.

Yesterday, the PM said, “People, wherever they are should stay put, and not travel”. With no work, no food, no dwelling, no relatives, this is nightmare for crores of Indians, who were forced to migrate, a phenomenon that has come to be mainstay in a globalised liberalised nation. But, as some one trolled, when “Globalisation” is replaced with “Global Isolation”, the migrants reach a state of squalor, which no amount of rhetoric, nor promises would help.

Most of my friends, in a better looked after state of Kerala, are Working From Home (WFH), and they have stocked up for the shutdown. When I , for instance, was sitting in front of the TV, watching Modiji declare the 21 day lock down, it didn't displace me from my comfort. 21 days is a bit too much, I thought. Thats all. Two weeks should be ok. One never sees the big side of the nation, the poorest half of the nation. Those that even today live a hand-to-mouth existence, the ones in perpetual deprivation. The ones, for whom this lock down is devastating.

These thoughts unnerved me, quite a bit. I stepped into my verandah, looked out into the darkness. “Suppose out there in a sunken home, there is this man, the bread-winner, whose tomorrow is too dark, and hopeless, and he looks around, sees light still burning in my comfortable home..., and suppose he also feels he has “no other way”, but to...”

The shut down may be unavoidable. There could have been “no other way”, but does it give us any lessons on the way we have distorted our communities, our society, our ways of life, our welfare systems, our confidence, dignity, economy, relationships and transactions. Time for thought, surely.

Sridhar Radhakrishnan

@sridhar67