Their wings looked humanly,
And stank as they soared
Along with the remains of stolen looms, engines roared.
The feathers of their wings were bounded using blood and flesh of Indians, cruelly.
Looms of gold, cloth of the most marvellous cotton thread.
While weavers dread.
A culture so fine and defined, swallowed by the well-read, who led the nation's head.
Handicrafts buried deep, dreams undreamt, lives like steel confined and wrapped in tapes that were red.
Our tradition and articles both raw, soft and surreal, sold.
At prices so low, a country couldn't row, couldn't afford crops to sow, economists lost their hold.
Their industries flourished,
While our children, denied access to school and hospitals on our land, slept malnourished.
Fine and cheap commodities wandered through
Suez, too scared to face the Indian Ocean's wrath, from Britain with a British crew.
{The Indian Ocean could have consumed their goods better.}
Farmers, weavers and industrialists bearing an underlying pain.
They wept to water their plants.... Waiting for rain.
Taxes and growth of unemployment went insane.
Our women were forced to put local supply down the drain,
Industries cloistered in the darkest darkness, "Saved smoke!", you'd say.
But back then the environment didn't help us pay.
India shed her wealthy identity along with her tears
Her economists quivered, clouded, drowning in fears.
A ray of hope {TISCO}, an industry of steel,
For the fathers who had their homes choking from poverty, it gave them a meal.
He had trapped her, she struggled for freedom.
When she attained it, how to face her world is what she fathomed.
She was like the autumn leaves, dried and drained of life, on the dusty ground.
While the tree who used her for his own beauty cover, stands strong, above her.
She was India on the eve of independence, 1947.
~ Divyangana.
