courtesy: Google Image
At present we Indians
are living in an in-between state,
neither true nor false.
‘Earn with integrity
Give back to society’
is the new mantra
of our government
these days. They believe,
they are working towards that goal.
So overnight 1000 and 500 rupee notes
were stripped of their status as legal tender.
We are given about two months time
to exchange them for fresh notes.
Apparently it’s all good.
Terrorists are pulling their hair
over their counterfeit money.
Desi* billionaires’ (our invisible potential foes)
spirits nosedived;
demonetization is demonization to them,
while our poor spirits sky rocketed;
‘an excellent move, now see how it feels to lose’,
we smirk at the shamelessly rich,
at the trigger happy terrorists,
at people sitting on piles of cash
amassed through bribery,
feeling betrayed by the govt.
We stand in long queues in banks
outside ATMs, perspire and even die
to have only 2500 rupee notes in cash
yet we praise the move
as in the new year
we are ringing out bribery, terrorism,
smuggling, ‘Black Money’ (local term for cash
stashed away to evade tax)
and ringing in honesty, integrity etc.
I hear from various news sources:
more than 23 billion junked bank notes
are stacked one on top of the other;
the pile would be 300 times
the height of Mount Everest.
I shudder to think of the aftermath,
as the cost to replace the old notes could be
as high as 200 billion rupees.
Have we truly become the denizens
of a bizarre Hyperbole-land, I wonder.
*‘Desi’ is ‘Local’
Posted for my Midweek Motif ~ Hyperbole (Stretch the Truth) @ Poets United
Note: This is just a sketch of what we’re going through. I dare say it’s a poem at all.
sumanar/lekha 