After having read Covert Novelist’s piece on `Style’, I thought of putting across the following lines composed more than a year ago (unpublished) to bring out a different perspective.
Amidst unacceptable deprivation and squalor
The call for glamour
Whether in beseeching clamour
Or unconcerned shameless patter
From super-rich and rich quarters
Makes its presence felt
Thanks to fashion trends and designer dresses.
God is unconcerned.
Twelve billion dollars annually spent
By American women for defying gravity
In an attempt to augment
Reduce or lift the breasts as if, for eternity.
Millions spent on butt lift and augmentation
For ridiculously expensive designer dresses
Or botoxing their calves and thigh lift surgery
To fit into skinny jeans and
Huge sums spent on arm liposuction and designer feet1
The glamour’s worm eats into the Indian fabric
Of the nouveau rich and even the middle class
Whose wardrobes are stacked,
Clothes over flooding into divans and strewn bundles
Not knowing what to do in the limited space
Except some occasional philanthropic outbursts,
Donate the used clothes to the underprivileged.
God is amused.
Not so blessed are the rural poor
Grounded and downtrodden
Used clothes for the debt-ridden
Folks would be a distant dream.
Variety is His wont,
Even amongst the poor.
Men too have joined the race for skin-tightening
And other facial aesthetic procedures
Going for the squarer jaws and leaner faces,
And manly chins, a Botox for Facelift.2
God is nonchalant.
People who work sitting down
Get paid better than
People who work standing up3,
Yet God doesn’t blink.
The abject poverty
And its multifaceted shame
Of unsheltered, uncovered, starving millions
Is reduced to a cliché,
God is asleep.
Thou art inscrutable indeed.
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- TOI, DelhiTimes,18June,`14
- The Eco Times,25August`14, male- grooming market in India, to zoom to Rs 5300 crores by 2016
- Ogden Nash
Salil Sanyal
salilsanyal 