Vivek Chakraverty begins with a boy who has been reduced to a "framework", a word we normally use for scaffolding or the bare structure of a building. Before we learn anything else about him, he has become a frame with nothing on it. The poem is about hunger, but its central claim goes further: the poverty it describes is not an accident of fate. It is something the powerful live off.
The first stanza is built from fragments. "A meal a day with luck" has no verb, and neither does "An infant with his scraggy mother". The grammar is as bare as the lives it describes. "Attenuated everyday" is the stanza's strangest phrase. Attenuated means thinned out or weakened, and because "everyday" is written as one word, it is not clear whether the days themselves are being thinned or the boy is. Either way, ordinary time has been stretched until it barely holds. The stanza ends on "No food to give", a line that is flat and final, and the weight falls on the mother, who has love and a lullaby but nothing else.
Then the poem turns on a phrase everyone has heard. "The corridors of power" is almost a cliché of newspapers and politics, but Chakraverty makes it literal and ugly: "Themselves they feed / With the blood of an orphan boy". Putting "Themselves" at the start of the line stresses the self-serving appetite. The image is close to cannibalism, and the poem quietly rearranges its first scene. The hungry mother and child are replaced by an orphan "crying alone in the street", so the poem moves from a family to a child with nobody. The street is open and exposed, while the corridors are enclosed and private. The poem sets the two places side by side without comment.
The third stanza widens the lens, and the numbers climb with it: "millions", then "billion", then "zillions". "Zillions" is not a real number. It is a casual, almost slangy word for a quantity too large to count, and that is exactly the point. When suffering is that big, people stop seeing individuals, which is why the stanza opens with the blunt "Nobody remembers". The title returns as the stanza's last line, and the ordinary-sounding word takes on a bitter edge. The only help imagined here is a prayer, "Lord help them in agony". Notably, no human being is asked to act. A reader might feel this is the poem's despair, or its accusation: if the corridors will not help, only heaven is left.
The final stanza echoes the architecture of the second. "Corridors of power" becomes "passages of haves", and again we picture long, walled routes that the poor never enter. What the poor need is tiny and concrete: "a few pieces of rice". Set against the abstractions of power and utopia, that small, countable phrase is the most painful image in the poem. The last two lines bring the only moment of near-rhyme, with "disaster" and "masters" closing the poem. After stanzas of loose free verse with no regular beat or pattern, the sudden chime sounds like a lock clicking shut. The irony is neat too: "utopia" suggests a perfect society, but it belongs only to "the masters", and the "ordinary mass" pays for it. The echo of "mass" and "masters" links the two groups even as it shows how far apart they are.
The poem is not subtle, and it does not try to be. Its prayer is conventional and its adjectives, like "scantily clad", are familiar. Its strength lies in its structure and its anger. It moves from one boy, to a crowd too big to count, to a system with a name, and by the end the reader can no longer treat hunger as a private misfortune. By repeating "boy" in the first two stanzas, once starving and once drained of blood, the poem ties the victim directly to the people who profit. Its significance lies in that connection. Many poems ask us to pity the poor, but this one asks who is eating while they starve.