Home shanti, home kranti: ‘Homeward Bound’ has lost the ballad’s romanticism 

Is there no limit to the power of this dyna-mite? Each day it blows up one more certainty, blasts its way through the entire syllabus of human experience: geography, politics, sociology, even swaggering STEM. Not content with bringing  globalisation to its knees, it’s going local with a vengeance, hitting little people hardest. In India, it has forced us to reconfigure what ‘home’ means. Being homebound, we can luxuriate in its opportunities or wallow in spurious martyrdom. Both are equally shaming in the context of those wanting to be homeward bound. Tuesday’s TOI headline quoted a frustrated migrant calling the Mumbai arrangements ‘a farce’. Actually, it’s being repeated across the country as tragedy.

Have migrants become the new untouchables? Next we’ll brand them anti-nationals for subverting India’s tomtommed fight against corona – their home states, or even districts in their adopted one, have already barred entry to migrants from red zones. Are they now akin to the proverbial ‘dhobi’s dog: na ghar ka, na ghat ka’? The city where they came to work has abandoned them; their native place is banging the door in their beseeching face. Worse awaits them if and when they beg, cajole, trudge their harried way home. Where they fled from and to in search of a dream have both become a nightmare.

Before we cluck in superficial sympathy from the safety of our social distancing, consider which of us is not a migrant. Didn’t so many of us buy a ticket to opportunity, no NOC demanded at non-borders? My family’s paper in Calcutta depended on the callow Bihari youths whom Granpa trained to typeset in Gujarati. When i migrated to Bombay, almost everyone i worked, lived and chilled with was from some place else. Why, even the rooted son of the soil works, shops, eats and entertains himself with the ‘outsider’ he politically condemns.

Now our epidemic has infected the whole idea of longing and belonging. Since the corona-tossed migrants are equally Indian, the Centre is more responsible for them than the states acting at anarchic whim. The buck stops at the big Home. Sadly, its mantri hasn’t been too good at the constitutional spelling of ‘citizenship’; he’s better at dictating it.

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Alec Smart said: “If lockdown doesn’t open with whis-key, will vodka work? Absolut-ly.”