Man With No Home

Now I have no home. No. I am not a refugee from a third world country. I am victim of the economic system whereby I have to shift my location away from my family in order to get the dole that is given to me as salary for my services to the company, a government owned company in India.

Strangely, and I am not alone in viewing it as such, this is because I got a promotion with which came a reduction in pay. Easy to understand if you are in the service of the Government of India or a State Government. You dont get the House Rent Allowance which you used to get for living in your own house at the old location. And that is 30% of your basic pay and one-fifth of your take home pay. Some promotion ! And you can do nothing about it. Not even suggest a remedy to the powers that be because that might be viewed as misconduct !

So I live six days of the week in the town where I am posted and one day with my family at Kolkata and I am confused as to which town/city I should call my home.

I know I am fortunate in having a secure job. There are others in this economic system where persons work thousands of kilometres away from their families on six month contracts. From time to time they are stranded at home without a contract. The power of money !

Love after Love

Love After Love
by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Thats a lovely one with which I have been in love ever since I saw it sometime last year.