The Tale Being Rewritten

We were born
with borders drawn by others,
our histories footnoted
in someone else’s language.
Our grief was measured in policies,
our labour exported,
our voices redacted.
They said we were
a nation from the global South,
like we were an afterthought,
a place to extract from,
to borrow colour and culture,
but never credit.
And yet, here we are
Still standing and rising.
We have tasted salt
from tears and sweat
and still know how to sing.
We have watched forests fall
and fields dry,
but we’ve also watched farmers
take to the streets
with slogans sharper than any scythe
We’ve seen textbooks lie
and yet mothers
pass the truth like lullabies
to children who ask,
Why do they treat us inferior?
Politics was once
something done to us
Now, it grows from us.
It is the barefoot woman
who runs for office in Odisha,
the trans candidate
who walks with pride through Chennai rain
It is the Adivasi youth
writing manifestos in their mother tongue,
and the Dalit poet
turning pain into platforms.
We are not just resisting,
we are rewriting
This story, our story; together
Our revolution
does not wear suits with tie,
It smells of soil,
sounds like drums,
feels like a classroom under banyan tree,
where a child learns
not just to read,
but to question.
We are no longer asking for space,
we are building it
In cooperatives and community kitchens,
in solar fields and reclaimed rivers,
in shared code and seed banks.
From Dispur to Kanyakumari,
from Gandhinagar to Kolkata,
we are stitching new futures
with the threads of the old,
held together by calloused hands
that have always known
how to make something
out of nothing.
Yes, we carry wounds
of partition, and extraction
but we carry something else too:
a memory of what it means
to begin again.
Call us some Global South,
but know this,
we are not beneath,
we are becoming
not just the story of suffering,
but of survival,
not just a response to empire,
but the root of what comes next.