Huger.....

The name of a poem we are studying as part of the literature course. this one thing made me wonder what is a good poem to start with. one that you can easily understand or one that makes you look deep and think. It is a perspective ofcourse..moods depend. whether you want to read something like goodbye miss pushpa or huger.

the peom has one one reading nothing to even attract my attention. in fact on a single glance it doesnt make too much sense. ofcourse certain undertones can be detected. but before i tell you the tru pourpose behind this entry heres the poem....for you to read and see what you can make of it.

'Hunger', Jayanta Mahapatra
It was hard to believe the flesh was heavy on my back.The fisherman said: Will you have her, carelessly,trailing his nets and his nerves, as though his wordssanctified the purpose with which he faced himself.I saw his white bone thrash his eyes.

I followed him across the sprawling sands,my mind thumping in the flesh's sling.Hope lay perhaps in burning the house I lived in.Silence gripped my sleeves; his body clawed at the frothhis old nets had only dragged up from the seas.

In the flickering dark his lean-to opened like a wound.The wind was I, and the days and nights before.Palm fronds scratched my skin. Inside the shackan oil lamp splayed the hours bunched to those walls.Over and over the sticky soot crossed the space of my mind.

I heard him say: My daughter, she's just turned fifteen...Feel her. I'll be back soon, your bus leaves at nine.The sky fell on me, and a father's exhausted wile.Long and lean, her years were cold as rubber.She opened her wormy legs wide. I felt the hunger there,the other one, the fish slithering, turning inside.

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what do you think it means. the last stanza should really clear up things for you, but okay cutting to the chase. its a poem of a father and a daughter who are so poor that the father forces his daughter into prostitution just to earn a living. the daughter is supposedly 15 years old right. okay so thats the crux of the poem.
what my point is then, is that this happens today we all know that im sure none of you reading this are walking around with rose tinted glasses. but revolting as it is its the truth. the shocking part is that some people in my class din't even know this could happen. to them it was perhaps a fictional pice of the poets skewed up disgusting mind!
Here we are living ur lives, we see the beggars on the roads, we've been seeing them since forever, we are so numb to their presence. A simple 'aage chalo' dismisses that dusty, hungry, ragged body, i call it a body because we dont even register them as people. We even joke about it in subtle ways with our friends. How many havn't said 'aage chalo' to some one or the other. Are we then by our failure to respond to these pleas of help condoning them to generation and generations of misery? of poverty? 'let the government handle it' right? thats the answer? im not saying give money to every beggar you see. We the poeple are the government, it just needs us to walk out of our ivory towers, a/c halls and take two steps in the truth of India. I write this, i know that these may well be only words for i dont have the time to go myself. but forcing his daughter to sell her body so that they can eat? infact it is hard to leave those words written there on the screen...'its only word' because it leaves negative light on me. i become a preacher without any practice. but maybe if i leave them here they'll nag me enough to go do sumthing on the lines of what i feel right now. Big words should not remain in a hollow voice. I shall help.

and if you know of some one who would read this and devote time to these lost people, ask them to read it, maybe they need that jolt, like mine was hunger. i know some one she already does do social service in the true sense of the term....pria. every drop in the ocean would help.