She feels distraught

because she does not get complete information

what can I do to help him

she depends on me for love,

Every time she knows something incomplete,

or one day she’ll stop asking

Or when she will be reprimanded for asking

one day suddenly some day

taking a deep breath

She will turn her face away quietly.

These are the lines from late poet Raghuvir Sahay’s poem ‘Uska Man’. In the poem, he is talking about a woman. But, as is the case with every great poem, its pronoun can be used in different contexts.

In the context of today’s India, does this pronoun ‘she’ represent the collective noun we know as public? Not getting information can be a reason for being distraught. Just as it is difficult for a woman to survive as an individual without information, information is the lifeline for people in any democracy.

This poem came to my mind when I saw YouTuber Dhruv Rathee’s latest video that is creating a sensation on social media platforms.

When we thought, and not wrongly, that India was sleepwalking into a dictatorship, the news of this video being watched by more than 10 million people came as a shock to many of us. Especially the fact that the video is getting popular among the youth.

© The Wire