DEAR INDIA

Today is the nth day of the lock-down,

Social distancing is still a distant thing for most of us.

  Thousands of deaths have been registered, 

while a few hundred have gone unnoticed.

Isn’t it adorable how united we as citizens are? 

But if we start contemplating this, 

one has to wonder how exigent social distancing as an idea would be,

for a country that had pioneered the “ art of untouchability”,

for a government that can easily maintain a distance and,

 successfully turn an eye to the Guardian knot of lack of testing as well as

 unavailability of PPEs and,

 leave us in the lurch,

for a nation where laborers and migrant workers are eschewed in the name of social distancing,

for a country where volunteers or the crisis-fighters are dodged off from a distance for the sake of safety,

and in a land full of  peacocks where our leaders are so distant from us that

 it takes a day to remind us that 

"We still live in a democracy"