The poet, who mostly writes about the plights and sufferings of migrant labourers, most of whom fall in the lower rungs of our society,   started out with Ghar Chodne Din, a poem where he explores the feelings of a worker who is about to leave his home.

 The other poem he narrated, Daju Sahid-Bhauju Pardesi, is about a migrant labourer who leaves home for a menial job in the Gulf during the time of the Maoist Revolution. Years later, he returns home to find that his wife has already eloped with someone else.

Grief-stricken, he starts living in the forest. One day, when the forest turns into a battlefield of the Maoists and army, he is killed by a stray bullet. The poem is written in third-person narrative, through the perspective of the labourer’s sister.

But the poem that received much accolades during the programme was Kabi Shrawan Mukarung Lai Qatar Bata Prashna, a poem Rai wrote as a reply to Shrawan Mukarung’s poem Qatar Ka Kabi Lai Prashna. In the poem, he challenges the narrative of victimhood that’s often used to describe these workers. Instead, he portrays them as hardworking, enterprising and courageous people who’ve not just constructed man-made wonders in the desert of the Arabian peninsula , but have also become the backbone of our country’s economy.

Along with Rai, the programme also saw Shelling KC, Prakash Thamsohang and Sundar Lawati reciting their poems. At the end of the programme, poet Mukarung praised poet Rai for his effort in highlighting the issues of migrant labourers.