Good morning to the country where patriarchy works its magic: it lifts one man’s mann ki baat into an imaginary heaven and buries a million other voices in cages. The nonstop diversions of PR tell us the crowing is divine and the laying is common. They crown the noise as prophecy, while the labourer — condemned to twelve-hour shifts in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Gujarat, and the other so-called rich states — is reduced to duty: to iPhone plants, to assembly lines, to the worse places owned by baniyas, old and IIT/IIMed alike.
But the hens know. Their bodies know better. Their wings know. They carry the memory of their mothers, the echo of a freer world, the feel of earth underfoot. And most of all, they know the rooster is no god. He is only louder.
