By Anandojit Goswami and Jeevesh Gupta:
For all the unnamed students who stood for India, which we redefine every single day of our lives. It’s not a frozen mould of structures but a potpourri of a million years of imagination of a billion minds dreaming about a secular, diversified land.
2019, I Wish You Ended Earlier!
When yellow turned red,
And he is raided in her bed.
When red became a rainbow, it rained high and low.
When idiosyncrasies became the rule
The question I had to ask to my very own self,
Who and why am I?
When you learnt to sleep with open eyes, look beyond the skies,
And drove forward looking behind.
When love got redefined, and religion became my identity etched on my forehead,
Even though the head was dead,
The question i had to ask to my very own self,
Where did I come from?
When all I wanted was to fly, be grounded and see high,
All I wanted was to feel the flutter of the multi-hued butterflies hovering over me,
I just wanted to hear the squirrels and rabbits nibble in my ears,
Dig into the soil and see the rabbit hole in a whole,
Look into my one-year-old’s eyes and tell him that he is born in the best possible place in this entire globe without a robe,
The question I had to ask to my very own self.
Where does he belong?
When children, cried, shouted, marched the streets for clean air and water across the globe,
Millions gathered against climate change,
When all were wishing that sparrows flew back and sing into Delhi,
The question which loomed over us took us many notches back,
What’s the religion of this air that I breathe?
When she bled even after her death for 7 long years,
When nothing changed apart from her name changing from
Jyoti-Nirbhaya-Jyoti,
And many more get added to the list,
We shout, we march, we roar but to no avail,
We also add a ‘wo’ to a man and a man to a ‘wo,’
Guns rain bullets and sticks silence the voice,
Someone made Lipstick Under My Burqa and now it’s bindi on my lips,
Ek aur saal guzar gaya, jaagte raho!
(another year passes by, stay awake/alert)