Bangalore-based poet Ruby Naaz has penned a powerful and soul-stirring piece, urging mothers across the world to instill sensitivity in their male child and pull-down patriarchy. Ruby, who collaborated with Connected to India for the poem, titled, Hello Mother, wrote it amid the growing violence and atrocities against women in India, the recent being the brutal rape and murder of a junior lady doctor at the state-run RG Kar Hospital in Kolkata, the state capital of eastern India’s West Bengal.
Known for her ability to write poems on demand, churning out pieces within a quarter of an hour while typing it using her typewriter at Bangalore’s iconic Cubbon Park, Ruby took four days to write the poem.
“It took me four days to compose this. Not as fast as I write at Cubbon (Park). Since it was for a mother, it was not to be forgotten that she, too, has gone through this. So, it’s not a woman’s cry, it’s a little girl’s plea. Even today, the atrocities that we see that are happening, there are a lot of cries, there are a lot of screams, and I think what we are trying to say is getting lost, because nobody is listening to that girl.
“I think even women themselves are not listening to that anymore and that is why I’m addressing it to the mother without actually taking away and knowing that she too has gone through this,” she says.
Ruby says that the process was emotionally tolling for her and continues to be so every time she reads the poem.
Watch the full interview here.
