Naked truths

In the shadows of  ornate steeples, facades,  spires, minarets and domes of churches, mosques and temples, built with millions of dollars for gods, (to administer compassion, love and justice) naked hungry millions sleep by the side of foul gutters flowing with sludge. Some of them cringe at the approaching masked face of death. They scavenge the city’s streets, lined with the mansions of the clergy too, for crumbs of bread.  

The bishops, cardinals and pope clad in spangled vestments and with their choir members offer melodious hymns, worshipful songs from their palaces which rise up in cadence to the seat of god mingled with the sobs and prayers of the poorest from their ramshackle, filthy shacks.

When a jet crashes over a mountain, incinerated limbs scatter over the whole jungle unattended to. During a war thousands of soldiers killed are pushed from the ships into the seas. There are those multitudes that get drowned in a shipwreck and become food for the fishes. Myriad carcasses decay in the battle fields. Mountaineers and explorers get frozen up in the snow and perish unknown and unheard.  But a parish accords a religious funeral with all paraphernalia to an old woman.

As the sybarites waltz and carouse in decorated gastronomic halls the frail riggings of ghetto kids pulsate as they rummage the waste bins. The filled up go downs of arsenal belch smugly with their subdued thirst for holocaust amplified by the guffaws of jets, ICBMS, rockets and the muffled roar of subs. There are nations which spend a lion’s part of their GDP for defense and they often fail to see the intense cramps of hunger of the poor billions who live in abject poverty.

A child gets abandoned in ghettoes soon after its birth; a planned house and expectant parents await the arrival of another with the best of everything modern medicine and technology can buy. A grim future and probable death awaits a child born in Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, India and others; good nutrition, care education and comfortable life awaits those of the developed countries A tubercular, frazzled fisherman dies in the high seas as his tiny boat is swallowed up by the rising billows. A cancer patient gets fiver facilitates and state of the art treatment as he fights back determined to recover.