fms April 2017

“Sunshine Uncle, you seem very tired today.”

“Heat, brother, it’s the summer heat. And, also, got a big download of laments!”

“Okay then, get our wages increased.”

“What!? Strength is yours, and you’re asking me?”

“If we speak, it rises to insurrection.”

“And when did you start fearing that?”

“Aaah ha. What did you surmise? We fear? Fear is travelling across. It has even reached journalists. They speak in fear.”

“You speak in riddles.”

“If I speak, you will shiver!”

“Come on, winters are over!”

“True. As I was saying to my friends here, we do all the actions, and in reaction we hear lots and lots of speeches. The deluge of words quickly slides into how weak, how helpless we are. And so I say, when we speak, it brings shivers, because when we speak we, once again, do not look helpless.”

“Sunshine Uncle, let me tell you something that happened yesterday. One of our friends went to the HR manager to get an explication of his salary slip. Working with his cruel intelligence Mr. HR took our friend to the contractor to get him terminated. It was tea time. Our friend phoned us. Word spread. Work stopped. All went to HR. He got rattled. The next shift was made aware. This will go on for some days.”

“These collisions are ever-time.”

“Ha ha overtime vs. ever-time?”

“True. An incremental circling of a coming storm, an unpredictable, unbounded, shifting force. We hear these days that research says small micro-events are connected and bring about massive shifts that engulf all.”

“For sure. Engulf it will. The question then is, how to face this with radiance and confidence.”

“Your words are elegant. But I’m afraid I don’t get them fully.”

“Okay Sunshine Uncle, let me try. A few days back a robot hit a worker on his head. Not only did he end up with a one inch deep gash, he also lost his job. This factory has about 100 robots. We tire out. We need rest. We ask question of values. We argue over explanations. They keep working.”

“So you’re saying we come with hassles and robot with none. Is that what managements like?”

“We too are attracted to them, but this allure has not found a description between us. At the moment it is clouded with fear and doubt. I think that, in our time, robots may displace the work-dependent meaning we give to life.”

“Yes, it is being said that we are in an interval of a rapid disappearance of work. And what you are saying is that in this interval it is of immense significance what radiant thoughts, actions, and questions will emerge.”

“Over the last many years this radiance emerges and shines, then hibernates in subterranean flows.”

“Those who get scared of this radiance deny it ever happened.”

“Sunshine Uncle, do you get it? When we’re called helpless, it comes from fear. A fear of radiance.”


Faridabad Majdoor Samachar (Faridabad Workers’ News)
Issue # 346
April 2017

Page 1: “A Fear of Radiance”
Page 2: Conversations In, And With, Many Transient Groups
Page 3: Commoning
Page 4: The Hollowness of Punishment; Fear Strikes Manesar

Contributions welcome

We currently print 16,000 copies at the monthly print cost of Rs. 14,000/-. We are able to meet this through contributions. To sustain us, you can send a bank transfer. Please write to us, and we will send you the bank details.

Distribution is over one month from 25 places in Faridabad, Okhla, Gurgaon, NOIDA and Manesar. Through this, we enter into thousands of conversations. Please write to us if you would like to join us; we will let you know of the place and time.

FMS_April2017 by baatein1 on Scribd

fms March 2017

“Of late, the management de-activates sensor to increase production.”

“That’s a horrible attitude.”

“Sensors reduced the injuring and chopping off of hands in power presses. Machines would stop. But sensors are removed to jack up production, and once more there is an increase in injuries.”

“Such cruel intelligence is widespread. It’s a blow to life.”

“True. Tears and laments are perhaps an expression of encounters with cruel intelligence, but delay an understanding of the operation of this cruel intelligence.”

“Listening to you all I feel that we encounter this specific form of intelligence everyday, but personify it in our conversations, quickly forgetting what we started to think on, encircling ourselves with summary denunciations of this or that personality.”

“What do you mean, ‘personified forms’?”

“Nothing complex. Statements like, this manager is bad, that supervisor is mean, that general manager is crude — and one can keep adding adjectives and positions.”

“These laments are common. A counterforce to life-force.”

“I feel that every instance of cruel intelligence stuns us. It cuts into the equality that we live by — equality of life, of intelligence, of compassion, of joy, and of the capacity to create.”

“From what you are saying, or what I can make of it, it seems that the laments of daily life are a visible layer of the rumbling subterranean.”

“True. Often, the proximity of a lament makes us become lost in it.”

“Below the surface is the collision of intelligence.”

“We sense this collision. Whenever we are in conversation with each other, we advise each other on how to disable this cruel intelligence.”

“How?”

“Whenever — by ourselves or with another — we go into despair of cruel intelligence, we get exhausted battling with its personified form. But when in groups of 5 or 6, or 7 or 8, however and wherever they may get formed, our discussions cast personified forms aside, and we start thinking, sharing, advising on how to restrain, de-activate, in-operationalise this form of intelligence.”

“Now that you put it this way, I see this conversation is active, it is all around.”

“But sister, how do we remember these conversations? Agreed, these conversations, these collisions of intelligence, are all around, and there is a churning, but they are also momentary, transient, and multiple, and they fade rapidly.”

“Hmm, so you are now asking me for methods to remember? What I have come to understand is that it is best not to entangle ourselves in methods of remembering. It is when the frequency, intensity, duration, and presence of these conversations multiply and thicken, that they transmit and travel.”

“And then just as they travel from here to there, they will travel back from there to here too. The joy of this travel and momentum sheds the weight of cruel intelligence.”

“And we revel in our childhood enigma of where our body ends and the world begins.”

“Fantastic.”

Faridabad Majdoor Samachar (Faridabad Workers’ News)
Issue # 345
March 2017

Page 1: From Here to There, From There to Here.
Page 2: Father-Daughter Conversation; Commoning.
Page 3: Excerpts of Conversations in Transient Groups on the Roadside, in Okhla, Gurgaon, Manesar.
Page 4: Excerpts of Conversations in Transient Groups on the Roadside, in Udyog Vihar.

Contributions welcome

We currently print 16,000 copies at the monthly print cost of Rs. 14,000/-. We are able to meet this through contributions. To sustain us, you can send a bank transfer. Please write to us, and we will send you the bank details.

Distribution is over one month from 25 places in Faridabad, Okhla, Gurgaon, NOIDA and Manesar. Through this, we enter into thousands of conversations. Please write to us if you would like to join us; we will let you know of the place and time.

FMS_Mar2017 by baatein1 on Scribd

fms February 2017

“Fantastic. From audacity to audacity, we lift each other. Spread.”

“It’s time for a festival of audacity. A reader reminded me about an aphorism of Tathagata. A disciple asked Tathagata, ‘Which is the most auspicious day for festivities?’ Tathagata replied with his renowned gentleness, ‘A day before your death.’ Bewildered, the disciple asked, ‘How do we know the day of our death? It has no date, no certainty.’ Tathagata smiled, ‘So, then celebrate and be festive each day.’

“Fantastic. If festivity is our starting line, many assumptions will crumble.”

“Which assumptions?”

“Fantastic! Like job-job-job gives meaning to life. Like, get pulped and ground today to enjoy the breeze from a skyscraper later.”

“The sense life as festivities rolls about in my head. I’m amazed by the variations and differences I see all around.”

“Amazing. Have you seen the beaks of birds? The nectar feeding are different from the fruit eating, which are different from surface skimming, which are different from scything, and those from different from chiseling, which are different from dip netting, which are different from probing, which are different from filter feeding.”

“True. Amazing. My uncle and his friends say that when they went with their inner factory conflicts to other factory workers by standing in street corners for hours, daily, for months, with placards, they sensed an intense diversity and variation in people around them.”

“Fantastic, my friend! But a question. How come we lose this sense of a million variations, and, worse still, become fearful of them?”

“No, it’s even worse! We lock it away. Sometimes words give us a frame, and we get locked inside it. Like us ‘tenants’ in Kapashera. So many of us are tenants. And yet, the word doesn’t bring any closeness between us.”

“Fantastic! But inside the factory, we are in a remarkable closeness. Then again, between factories this closeness weakens. This is my biggest bafflement.”

“My uncle tells me that our generation keeps moving between factories, so we will find a way. He says his generation failed to address this question adequately. But now we need to address it in our own way.”

“Fantastic.”

Faridabad Majdoor Samachar (Faridabad Workers’ News)
Issue # 344
February 2017

Page 1: Daily Festivities Are the Way
Page 2: Crookedness & Crookedness; Weakening Companies
Page 3: It Does happen, with Togetherness; Commoning; A Letter
Page 4: Everyone Speaks - Through a Thousand Forms of Speech.

Contributions welcome

We currently print 16,000 copies at the monthly print cost of Rs. 14,000/-. We are able to meet this through contributions. To sustain us, you can send a bank transfer. Please write to us, and we will send you the bank details.

Distribution is over one month from 25 places in Faridabad, Okhla, Gurgaon, NOIDA and Manesar. Through this, we enter into thousands of conversations. Please write to us if you would like to join us; we will let you know of the place and time.

FMS_Feb2017 by baatein1 on Scribd

Autonomy in India: Tactical and Strategic Considerations on the New Wave of Workers’ Struggles

https://www.viewpointmag.com/2017/01/23/autonomy-in-india-tactical-and-strategic-considerations-on-the-new-wave-of-workers-struggles/