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Impure
In the most populous nation in the world,
there lies a population who are invisible and untouchable.
Their sorrows and sufferings are cast in the dark,
compounded further and further like rocks aging into fossils.
The pain has not been for years, nor centuries, but rather millennia;
emerging from a society of superiority and inferiority, in the name of false religion.
He walks around in the endless fields of shacks and huts and trash, scavenging,
just like his siblings, parents, grandparents and ancestors.
They don’t have any hope left, when others around them don’t have hope either;
they are shunned, branded as unlucky and inauspicious.
The rich relax in their high-rises, selfish, offering heaps of sweets and riches to idols of god,
turning a blind-eye to virtues of compassion and to those who really need it.
The vast diaspora, too, lives in the comforts their counterparts can’t dream of–
yet even they cannot stop judgement when it’s subtler than looks and names.
It continues because it has been this way for so, so long,
and change carries the burden of altering our identities.
Waste has always been associated with the notion of caste purity,
and in a country so large, it will never stop being produced.
And so, we dream of a time when someone’s caste is not determined by their birth,
but rather how they lead their life.
We envision of a time where caste is no longer synonymous with money or lack of it,
but instead what one does with their wealth.
When our focus is directed inwards to what pure really means, only then can change occur,
for those who hail from the most populous nation.
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This poem tries to articulate the caste-based discrimination prevalent in the Indian community.