And when you come down,
To my city of amorous joys.
Amidst a social chaos in a plethora of faiths,
Fantasizing spirituality, prostituting beliefs,
Loud cries of hypocrite secularism —
To encapsulate it all: a diverse culture!
Amidst the constituted vindictive politics,
Unaccounted powers, vested by unaccounted population;
Each ballot a dramatised guillotine —
Under the guise of the world’s most expansive constitution.
Countless crippled NGOs amidst sham donation camps.
Beggars casting scornful glances from behind shaded lenses,
Exhibiting children rented for mere pennies.
Shining one, among top ten emerging metropolises!
Amidst the residents of intrepid slums trading votes for flats,
Eking out lives with leased-out homes of supposed rescue,
And amidst vast self-contained high-rises,
Their walls cracking from the strain of shoddy craftsmanship.
Amidst unkempt crowded alleys
Winding through hawkers flaunting their wares,
And six-lane highways,
Constructed to the tune of state debts.
Amidst unemployed poets of abstract notions
Perishing under the audience’s unrelenting mediocrity.
And son of a son of engineers and doctors,
Lost among the masses, drowning in complacency.
Amidst six hundred Chevrolet Optras
And thirty thousand auto-rickshaws,
Amidst you and amidst me.
I ponder where I’m up to in this city of idealised dreams!
Shamasis Bhattacharya 
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