If A Countryside Villager, I Mean A Rustic Turns Into A Minister For The First Time, What Will He Do It, Do You Know It? Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

If a countryside village rustic turns into a minister,
What will he do,
Do you know it?
He will try to keep power
After reining it all,
The fool’s lathi and the goon’s unlicensed pistol
Will be the chief tools of his
Firepower, man power and muscle power,
Handing power to chieftains,
Street roamers and loafers,
Fools and illiterates,
Not at all to the educated
Who may in their turn wrest power
From him
Which he can never again.
A fools’ s son, he can but think in this way,
This his political algebra, equation and chemistry,
Power point presentation.

He will try to show, how could it be that a villager turned into a minister,
Surpassing the cultured one and the best educated townsman,
The administrative officers saluting him,
A posse of guards all around him
And he trying to visit the village home
On foot,
Waving the hands at the cameramen and photographers
From the nearby road to village,
Sometimes resting under the cools shade of
The banyan tree or the peepul tree,
remembering his childhood days,
More specially, how did he graze
The buffaloes by sitting
Under the shade,
But now a legislator not,
But the chief minister,
That shepherd boy, the rural boy,
The uncouth man,
On the midway talking with the old friends,
Asking about them,
Smoking a beedi,
A leafy, but with tobacco placed under,
Thinking and going
In the goggles
And in the pyjamas and the kurta.

Reaching the mud house, he entering into the cow shed,
Caressing the goats and the sheep,
The buffaloes and the cows
Which he used to graze,
The cameramen marking it,
The love of animals,
The socialists praising his love of labour,
His earthly contact,
The golden smell of the soil,
Taking off the sandals,
Washing the legs and hands
To bow before the household deity,
Sitting in the courtyard
On a date-leaf mat,
Someone comes he in the meantime
And offers him tobacco,
Rubbed and given
And he taking into
As wisdom-increasing mixture.

The time for the return journey has come and the minister returning
On a bullock-cart to reach the orchard plot,
And with it the people hearing the drone
Of a helicopter approaching
And it landing there, settling
To take the chief minister to the capital,
The tamasha of the countryside,
The one who has cut the nose of all
The educated and the learned,
Even by being a cow boy, a village boy,
A buffalo man,
Not a legislator,
But the chief minister of a province
And he peopling it all
With the people of type,
Making a farce of it all,
The world but a study in buffoonery and mockery
And he mocking at, befooling others.


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