What have they done
I feel for Bombay. No, let me call it Bombay, for once. It is this same city that I have felt for, in the prose of Rushdie, Mistry and Suketu Mehta. It is this city, Pankaj kapoor called his mehbooba, so aptly, in the movie Maqbool.
I have sailed the rough waters of Bombay, I have travelled in the trains, those which were ripped apart yesterday.
And they have done this to it.
Via Uma’s blog, I came across a very simple but moving poem this morning. I wish to post it here. Along with that, my own poem, titled “Red”, I had written back in 2001 on one lonely night in Pune, after the 9/11 attacks.
“The Tibetan in Mumbai”.
The Tibetan in Mumbai
Abuses in Bambaiya Hindi,
With a slight Tibetan accent
And during vocabulary emergencies
he naturally runs into Tibetan,
That’s when the parsis laugh.
The Tibetan in Mumbai
Likes to flip through the MID-DAY
Loves FM, but doesn’t expect
A Tibetan song.
He catches a bus at a signal,
Jumps into a running train,
Walks into a long dark gully
And nestles in his kholi.
He gets angry
When they laugh at him
‘ching-chong-ping-pong’.
The Tibetan in Mumbai
Is now tired …
Wants some sleep and a dream,
On the 11p.m.Virar fast
He goes to the Himalayas,
The 8.05 a.m. fast local
Brings him back to Churchgate
Into the Metro: a New Empire.
By Tenzin Tsundue. Full poem, somewhere on this page.
“Red”
So who’s to blame,
for all this mess.
The anger and the sorrow
in the daily press.
Those individuals who decide
our fear for the airplane
and the intensity of our pain
or the politicians killing people
and going insane.
Theres blood on the radio,
reporters working overtime,
people watching red screens,
bomb blasts for primetime.
But what I am to say?
what am I to do?
Because these bombers and jets,
they will come and go,
while this heat
will be left to overflow.
By Aditya Kumar
2 Responses to 'What have they done'
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Nice t know that you feel so strongly about Bombay. Got most of my relatives there. We are too of a kind. I too wrote a poem after 9/11 and used the same on my latest post on Mumbai.
Hiren
12 Jul 06 at 11:55 pm
The city was devastated. This time round, it wasn’t so easy for the city to be normal again.
Pradeep
14 Jul 06 at 10:11 am