His bad angles

His bad angles

I beg your pardon learned writer!
I do not buy your image
That you deftly paint on the troubled Page.
I reject it, I resent it,
It exposes to me your unkind habit.

You cannot paint
A picture of the working class
Struggling in the rat race, 
And forcefully pour
The colour of poverty
Onto my Race.

You have done it many a times
In the past.
People of the third world,
Typecast. 

A stereotype refugee,
Stamped on our brown face
As an authentic Bangladeshi.
Negativity personified,
To depict our goings-on
As a single story, sans grace.

Open your eyes my folks!
Read between the lines!
His bad angles
From the glass houses, 
Pelt stones at my poor ‘anglais’
To divert the real issue,
So the world and its cousin
Never has a clue
Of what’s going on.
Posterity will know
Us for sure, as riffraff
As those untidy needy morons!

In their poems and proses
Bangladeshis figure
As butler, as laborers,
Sweating it out;
But they hardly have a place
In literature and conferences
Walking hand in hand
As their friends.

Close your eyes,
Dear Brits! Think of the Bangladeshis.
Now sincerely,
Can you tell me please?
Before you, what image
Of them do you realise!

What did you see?
A herd of workers?
Working for you?
Below the carpet
Behind the walls?
Or did you see them
Working with you, as equals?

Dear erudite white scholar,
When you came here,
You became the ruler
A benefactor,
Didn’t you say you were
Also our saviour?

But when we went there,
We became bonded labourers?
Pointed out as paupers?
Bah! Isn’t it way too unfair?

There are thousands of
Wise men and women,
Stalwarts in our space
Which only impartial history,
Not written by you, can trace.

The problem with stereotypes
Is that, they are not untrue
But despite all the hypes,
And ballyhoo
They’re incomplete,
To say the least.

Why should Bangladeshis
Be in sweatshops!

Learned men and women
Can’t they be like you?
Reading books,
Driving cars, going places?

Or, on a lighter note,
They could be far better off
In those mouthwatering sweet-shops!

Dear man of letters!
In a sweatshop,
You could repaint
The Bangladeshis
As fish out of water,
If you please.

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