| Our bureaucrats are up for grabs in your nation Mahatma Gandhi. Nothing matters to them but cash, in your nation Mahatma Gandhi. The PDS is rotten to its core, in your nation Mahatma Gandhi We just stay hungry and poor, in your nation Mahatma Gandhi. |
| These were the opening words of the one song I heard at a public meeting, that received the kind of response that most songsters and deejays dream of. |
| It got the poor slum dwellers of several South Delhi slums, singing clapping "" even dancing, to its simple tune and shockingly direct words. |
| "It started when we sat with the slum dwellers of Sundarnagri, and asked ourselves how Mahatma Gandhi would feel if he came to earth today, and saw the problems the people he specially loved, the poor, faced," recounted Anand, who composed this song in 2002. The rhetorical question opened the proverbial floodgates, as people gave vent to their feelings and their anger. |
| "I just sat and wrote all of what I'd heard, down, and one day, when I was traveling on a train, the song just flowed out of my pen," said Anand. |
| The jan sunvai, a public hearing on the problems low income slum dwellers had with the Public Distribution System (see earlier story, Balancing the Accounts, 17.7.2004), was a smash hit, partly because the song helped people to lose their inhibitions and speak freely. |
| Our clever netas and bureaucrats ally, in your nation Mahatma Gandhi Like plugs and their sockets, in your nation Mahatma Gandhi Together they fleece the public, in your nation Mahatma Gandhi, To grease each other's bulging pockets! Only the untruthful flourish, in your nation Mahatma Gandhi |
| While honesty gets punished, in your nation Mahatma Gandhi There's corruption everywhere, in your nation Mahatma Gandhi We can see it "" can you? We wish! |
| We have no water in our taps, in your nation Mahatma Gandhi And our cattle have nothing to eat, in your nation Mahatma Gandhi Call it inflation or daylight robbery, in your nation Mahatma Gandhi But it's breaking our backs, slowly slowly! |
| At first, the audience looked scared "" how could they sing a song about people much more powerful than them? Then, one by one, they joined in. By the second verse, most responded enthusiastically, as the song took up more of their grievances, and that too so boldly. |
| The next two stanzas saw spirited singing, clapping and much stamping of feet. In the parts where bureaucrats and officials were called corrupt, people shouted the words at the officials and ration shopkeepers present. |
| Do they give us kerosene? Not in your nation Mahatma Gandhi! Have they provided us trains? Not in your nation Mahatma Gandhi! Is there harmony amongst us? Not in your nation Mahatma Gandhi! Do the thieves among us go to jail? Not in your nation Mahatma Gandhi! Look around, there's trouble everywhere, in your nation Mahatma Gandhi |
| The naked and hungry fight to live, in your nation Mahatma Gandhi Whatever we say, we're always wrong, in your nation Mahatma Gandhi, For we have no status, nor any caste! |
| "This song's had a great response wherever I've sung it," said Anand. Looking at an old woman who suddenly got up to dance, cackling in glee in response to some particularly incendiary lines, I agreed that the song definitely touched the right chords in the hearts of its listeners. |
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