'Where is Our Fair Share?' A Poem on the Oxygen That We Once Took for Granted

Poet Nidhi Thakur looks back at the year gone by and one of its most important lessons.

Nidhi Thakur. 

(Image: Kamran Akhter/The Quint)

While the first wave of the pandemic in the year 2020 in India was a horror story of the absolute poverty and disenfranchisement of the migrant labor, the year 2021 was a story of the mythical ‘all hell broke loose’. The one word that lingers on from that second wave and continues to suck air out of hope for future is ‘oxygen’.

Oxygen – that one ‘commodity’ that was simply ‘out of stock’ in the second wave, and neither wealth, nor fame, not Ram nor Rahim, not doctor nor soldier, could procure for the many hundred thousand young and old who perished gasping for breath, in homes and ambulances and hospital wards.

For India, the number of hospital beds per one thousand population remains at a miserable 0.5 (for Brazil and China the numbers are 2.1 and 4.3 respectively; WorldBank data), and the issue of augmentation of medical infrastructure should become a sincere consideration in all elections.

The acute shortage of oxygen in 2021 was symbolic of the myriad shortages that plague our system. For a democracy to survive on ballots as opposed to bullets, the voters will have to awaken to their basic duty of seeking accountability from their elected officials.

Above and beyond the beautification of malls, homes and places of worship, those who cast votes will have to seek answers to the questions: Where are the vaccines? Where are the hospitals? Where are the viable plans for pollution abatement? Where is oxygen?