Sunday, February 24, 2019

The right to rites.

Ceremonial welcomes and send offs
Are not certificates of one's birth and death;
They are a solemn declaration made on 
The arrivals and departures of the bodies,
With or without their breathing souls.
Rightful rites of religious sects fix them,
With caste denominations alien to creative norms.
But the last remains have to remain identifiable,
To be buried or consigned to flames,
In tune with the customary caste quoted rites.

When castes culminate in a single column of death,
I mean death at a single stroke,by multiple agents,
Like the contagion of nature or a heap of human terror,
Which rite is right to give a rightful send off,
To the huge bulk of bones and marred muscles?
Unfound bodies and invisible souls demystify
The doctored rights for performing community rites.
The consternation of dying and the cocktail of death,
Encountering calamities,accidents and terror strikes,
Call off the caste wise cries,to conduct'rightful'rites.

Many times when people die a brutal death,enmasse,
Whose right,routs the G P S for the last rites 
Of those,whose pushed deaths happen on a terror track?
It is the living who clamour for their rights, 
To own or disown,what they deem it to be theirs,
To mourn and make out formats of their mourning.
The dead could bother not about their rights and rites.
Where sacrifices surpass the rights of life,in massacres,
Moments of gratitude and their memories mark the rites,
As the right send off to the distorted bodies,'full of souls'.
P. Chandrasekaran.

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