आज फिर दधीचि चाहिए

From an old notebook

I had almost forgotten that I had written these lines.

I was much younger then. It was 1992, and the events in Ayodhya had shaken the country. Everywhere there seemed to be anger, arguments, questions of faith and identity, and a growing sense that something larger than a structure had fractured in Indian society.

Perhaps that is what made me pick up a pen.

Looking at these words after more than three decades, I cannot reconstruct the exact afternoon or night when I wrote them. I do not remember where I was sitting, what I had heard immediately before writing them, or whether I ever showed them to anyone.

But the words survived.

Reading them today, I meet a younger version of myself. He was angry at what he saw as the erosion of values and disturbed by a society being pulled apart. Yet his response was not simply despair. He went searching through the symbols he had grown up with: Gandhi for moral courage, Ayodhya for an India in turmoil, and Dadhichi for the willingness to sacrifice oneself for something larger.

I may have forgotten writing this poem.

Someone close to me remembered.

And perhaps that is reason enough to preserve it here—not as a political statement made today, but as a small piece of who I was and of what one young Indian felt during a difficult moment in the country’s history.

आज फिर दधीचि चाहिए

आज गांधी का समाज में विकल्प चाहिए,
काम जय हेतु सिंह-संकल्प चाहिए।

इंद्र के विलास से भर गया है व्योम,
कर दिया है नीतियों का यज्ञ में ही होम।
अयोध्या में हो रहा है झूठ संत सोम,
काँपता है भारतीयों का रोम-रोम।

देवभूमि का नहीं भी एक भाग चाहिए,
आज फिर दधीचि का विकराल रूप चाहिए।

— पंकज कुमार सिंह
1992