Posted this poem called "Communally Hated" on Shakespeare & Co. It has received an interesting mix of reviews and feedback. Do take a look. Here's something I wrote about the background of the poem:
The context is the intense dislike the son of the soil has for migrants, a subject that has fascinated me enough to write a novel about. I am a migrant in Bombay, you know, though I spent most of my life here. So, I have been listening to the voices of the sons of the soil describing the migrants.
We do make sterotypes of immigrants be it the locality, the city, and in a wider sense the country. Thus we seek to make common cause with people like us to dislike and hate these new people who bring with them their own cultures (as most of us do).
In some sense the context is also the communal flare ups we see now and then. It seems we have a tendency to target a community by their defining characteristics and then rain abuses on them, which is reflected in the words I used in this poem.
Tags: Migrant, Bombay, Communal, India
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