Masoom Sanyal shares a satirical story set in current times, making the reader question what is happening around us.
In the center of that small and forgotten Indian town stood a forgotten statue of a long-forgotten man. Each morning and evening, people passed the statue, but paid no attention to it. The statue, once respected and revered, now only attracted the attention of some idle birds who rested on it occasionally. The humans did not so much as look at the statue, except on the second of October, when it was washed and decorated with flowers. But apart from that, it was just a forgotten statue of a forgotten man.
It was a stone figure of a small, thin, and poor-looking man. Practically naked, except for a loin cloth and a shawl across his left shoulder, and a pair of round-rimmed spectacles. It held, in its right hand, a stick, a non-violent stick, a stick only meant to support and never to suppress. The statue had stood there for years and had been slowly forgotten. This forgetting of the statue and the man whose statue it was had not happened overnight. It had happened over the years, slowly and deliberately, as people had also forgotten the ideas of The Forgotten Man.