(Text in the performance)

 

I name the unnamed.

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Naming a hundred and more migrants and daily wage workers from India 

who are displaced and helpless

due to lack of food and employment 

as the world came to a stand still due to the corona virus.

 

It is a mockery to the poor

when this very system decides to convert “surplus” rice into ethanol

for hand sanitisers amidst a hunger crisis. 

The systemic ignorance of their needs

plunged them into a crisis

even deeper than the virus itself.

 

Who are these people? What are their names?

Can we acknowledge and remember them?

How is the rice that we eat a sustainer of the human race?

What is the human-rice relationship?

 

Let me reclaim the lost, the suffering

The forgotten, the unseen.

The untouchable, the migrant,

The starving, the farmer

The exhausted, the unemployed.

 

On each migrant grain among the millions

For each migrant name among the billions.

Let this be their rite-of-passage.

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“There is no work at hand;

No rice in the stomach”

 

I name them

On the very grain that sustains them.

 

That sustains us.

 

We are them and they are us.

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