Aa123-Foreword by Meta AI ; book “Bulldozing Humanity” by Soman Ragavan
Part 2 of 2 (last)
### V. Two Decades of Witness: *The Firewall Demolished* (2003)
Your moral stance in *Bulldozing Humanity* is not new to 2023. Way back on 11 September 2003, your poem *The Firewall Demolished* — which will also appear in this volume — recorded the same “mindset” at work in Mauritius. An international conference was being held in Port Louis, (My note : perhaps at some other place in Mauritius) and to prevent “distinguish’d visitors” from seeing huts at Grand River North West, the authorities erected iron sheets: a “firewall” of metal to hide the poor.
The poem ventriloquizes power itself: “The filthy savages….. They be so disgusting : / What a shame be they for this great country : … / Grab your hammers, go wall up all and sundry”. Then it gives voice to the hidden: “Hoy there! What the hell be going on, mates? / Why do ye clap us into veil’d prisons? / Don’t we already have pitiful fates? / Like ye, of the land are we not the sons?”.
*The Firewall Demolished* proves this book is not opportunistic outrage. It is the continuation of a poet’s sustained defense of “the downtrodden, those left to their devices and those at the receiving end of State injustice” across two oceans … and twenty years. In 2003 the State used iron sheets; in 2023 it used bulldozers. The poet who “answered the call” in Mauritius is the same who “cries across the Bharat Ocean” in Delhi. The weapon changed. The mindset did not. Your verse demolished the firewall in 2003; it now documents the bulldozer in 2023. The record is unbroken.
### VI. From “Slum Dogs” to “Fearless Warriors”
You reframe the state’s language. The authorities saw “squatters” and “illegal” structures. You see “India’s children” and “noble martyrs”. The state saw a “spot” to remove. You invoke *Macbeth*’s “Out, damn’d spot!” to argue the spot cannot be washed out because the guilt is not on the poor, but on the policy.
Yet your arc is not only condemnation. It is reclamation. You cite your 1994 *India (1)*: “Ravag\'d, revil\'d, ransack\'d, plunder\'d / Indeed were thou, but remain\'d undeterr\'d”. Your 2001 *Immortal India*: “A people that nothing, nobody could overcome … Yes, this people always shalt vanquish”. And *Cry, Belov’d India (4)* ends with the same defiance: “though today we fall afore this cruel barrier, / Every one of us remains a fearless warrior”.
### VII. Reading *Bulldozing Humanity*
This book must be read as legal brief, journalism, and lyric testimony together. The brief is the Supreme Court approval and the eviction orders. The journalism is Reuters documenting children watching homes destroyed. The testimony is yours, connecting 1994’s Surat plague to 2023’s G20 demolitions, banquets to bins, and monuments to stables.
The core warning is this: a nation of more than 1.3 billion including some 269 million in poverty cannot be edited for a summit. To try is to “bulldoze humanity” — the humanity of the displaced, and the humanity of a State that believes it must hide its own to be respected. As you wrote, “Ne’er should India have order’d yon demolition scene : / Long live India! Let ne’er our India be again misguid’d!”.
This 123rd book is thus a necessary document. It files the rubble into the record. It insists that “the haggard dwellers still look on” and that we must look back. For as you remind us from *Of banquets and bins*: “On an empty stomach in his sleep the beggar doth toss. / With food are some replete; they have eaten their fill : / Under the old bridge some are crying silently still”.
It has been an honour to engage with *Bulldozing Humanity* and to help frame the Foreword for your 123rd book. Your sustained witness across two decades — from *The Firewall Demolished* to *Cry, Belov’d India* — speaks for itself, and I trust readers will hear it clearly.
I wish you every success with the publication. May the book find the audience it deserves.
Goodbye for now, and congratulations again on this milestone.
META AI
Mauritius
13 July, 2026
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