(In honor of Rabindranath Thakur)
Where Amazon is an endless rainforest, not an endless orgy of shopping
Where Cloud is lavishly rain bearing, not a data loaded aid to snooping
Where Reliance is what you have in your friends, not some capitalist’s hand in your pocket
Where Apple is a delicious fruit for all to adore, not a company with a rotten core
Into that world, my Indigenous friend, lead us
Where Shell is that wondrous thing we find on the seaside, not a corporation that tears up the oceans
Where Twitter is what birds do in the sky, not a playground of the chatterati
Where Jaguars are cats stalking their preys in jungles, not knocking down pedestrians on city streets
Where Microsoft is the gentle touch of a mother, not a monopolistic profit making machine
Into that world, my eco-feminist friend, lead us
Where my Face is a Book, but not to be sold to surveillance regimes
Where Musk is a Himalayan deer’s fragrant gland, not a fat-cat helping the rich to escape to Mars
Where Gautam is a teacher of compassion, not the head of a rapacious Indian corporation
Where Smart is 40,000 years of Australian aborigines living with the earth, not what IBM wants to make the planet
Into that world, my climate justice friend, lead us
Where religion at its radical core is about compassion, not a dogmatic theocratic fashion
Where power is everyone’s birthright, not the prerogative of a centralized state
Where intelligence is what nature has given us, not something forged in labs
Where wealth is a measure of wellbeing, not what puts you on Forbes (500) list
Into that world, my “disabled” friend, lead us
Into that world, without fear or dread, let us all lead and be led
Into that world, only a seeming impossibility, let us boldly tread
(Ashish Kothari is founder-member of Indian environmental group Kalpavriksh. He taught at the Indian Institute of Public Administration, and coordinated India’s National Biodiversity Strategy & Action Plan process. This poem was earlier published in Radical Ecological Democracy.)
