Stop Acting! We Have Issues To Address! Poem by Veeraiyah Subbulakshmi

More than hundred million of our people,
Live in luxury. The luxury you can't find in any castle,
Of a European country, as the labor law is strict there,
Here in my father's land India, abused are our workers,
Who can work nonstop for the peanut salaries and old clothes,
Modern day slaves bend their heads to the floor,
Most of them not protected against ills and injuries,
Mansions and factories filled with cheap laborers,
Where the dogs are well fed, cared and have a clean place,
To call it their home, but the children of our brothers,
Have waited silently for a new dawn for many years,
During the visit of our ministers, our roads are spotless,
During inspection days, everything is kept in order to impress,
During the arrival of foreign dignitaries, the dramas enacted,
To show the prosperity of the poverty stricken political ideology,
When climb down the steps of the red carpeted,
Pathway of the airplane staircases, everyone with a nose,
Can smell the decaying of the uncollected rubbish,
Few kilometers away, the sides of the modern and old roads occupied,
By the homeless, who have nothing to say it their own,
Except the poverty that is nurtured in the hearts of poverty,
Which in turn disperse the seeds of poverty everywhere,
Through dirty wind, water and land agents, here
Seven hundred million live in poverty and another three hundred,
Try to act neither as rich nor as poor, but as a middle class.