Listening to Resonant Murmurs

FMS#364 || Faridabad-NCR || October 2018

How were the conversations?

Which ones?

Your investigations, like you were saying. You were going to ask your companions about the sparks igniting their lives — theirs, and the generation before them.

Gosh, please remind me!

Come on, stop joking. You launched such an argument on Sunshine Uncle, saying you will destroy the language of ‘helpless worker’ and start a completely new investigation. And that this will inaugurate a fresh milieu.

This I cannot forget. But you have spelt it out better than me.

How generous of you. Now come to the point. Did you have any conversations?

Yes, I did. And I understood a simple thing — for a good answer one needs to ask a good question. If one asks about helplessness, you hear notes on helplessness. And if you ask about spunk and joy, that's the direction replies flow in.

A poet in my neighbourhood says that poems come from the spark of living. And that a poet’s sharpest challenge is how to write the hurts of life without sacrificing the spark.

Your neighbourhood is immense. I asked one who has seen a lot in life what she would like to leave behind for everyone.

Excellent. This idea of ‘for everyone’. This question has a sense of both end and beginning. It is both singular and uncountable.

She replied, breeze. For me that evoked a resonant ambience in which she merges with everyone.

Asking a question and receiving an answer are intertwined. You listen well. Your listening captures the resonant. Listening sometimes gets lost when the listener asserts authority. Or you could say the continuous assertion of authority extinguishes listening.

You’re saying listening is a practice. But we are mostly schooled that only writing and reading are practices!

To me it seems there is as much ferment around listening as there is around thinking, writing, speaking.

Yes, a ferment. Recently a manager in a factory missed the time to listen to what was being said. And! Soon enough, the management had to run from the factory.

This is a strong port, through it we can try to understand the fluctuations of our intellectual lives. Ideas vanish because their protagonists no longer have the capacity to listen. But, this opens up spaces for many more voices to emerge.

The authority-seeking protagonists of vanishing ideas lament endlessly. This occupies much space.

You mean a lot of speech amongst and around us is the lament of authority-seekers? How to cut through that?

With laughter. That’s how we will hear other voices. We all know the swirl of thousands of murmurs around us. But there is one problem. Management that runs away afraid, returns with the might of the police, speaks the tongue of apologies and compromises, only to stabilise again.

No. Quakes remain. The murmurs stay resonant. And this is where questions we ask make an impact. Why? Because, I feel, resonant murmurs are world-making, future-making.

In short, our understanding that power is continuously destabilised and pushed towards vanishing, gives force and scale to the resonant murmurs around us.

Listening to these resonant murmurs is the decisive capacity in the now.

Fms October 2018 by baatein1 on Scribd

The amplitude of listening is built upon the strength of speech; the strength of speaking draws on the capacity for listening

FMS#363 || Faridabad-NCR || September 2018

We were standing at the railway crossing. It’s a good place for conversations with passers-by. It was a bit scatter though, this time; it was raining.

My meeting places were also in disarray. It’s as if the city is thirsty for rainfall, but when it rains it throws everyone.

One young man was walking, cradling his infant in his arms. He told me something lively as the rain.

Did that thrown you then?

Almost. He said that following a high court order allowing it, the management started planning reverting to the older minimum wage. We got to know. Call spread.

Then?

Then the same. Workers from three workplaces of the company assembled in the company headquarter courtyard. Seeing four hundred suddenly appear, the management lost its composure. It made assurances.

This had to be. Decisive acts. Collective will. Instant results. These are the paths of today. They are effective. I’m seeing it myself in my own workplace. News from other places is the same.

He was trying to get the child to sleep, but he was excited. He was happy.

This face of his — which has the pride, the glow of a collective — how is it going to reach his child?

What do you mean? The child is too small.

The child is small today. Not forever. In just a few years she will see the milieu, the rules that govern dignity, and the fluctuations.

I was never able to have this conversation with my parents. They take this form — of helplessness, of being compelled. The radiance of the collective that they would have been part of somehow never reached us through their words.

Like hollowed-out scabs between generations.

Are you also not able to speak with your children? Don’t mind, I just assumed your children are now older and have entered the world of work.

Nothing to mind in this. My kids are indeed older now, and this problem is none the simpler. Let me tell you a story. One of my colleagues told me how a senior manager patted his son’s back for having become an engineer and said, good you’ve escaped the labourer’s world. My friend said it felt like a slap. Our happiness at achieving something is interlaced with an attack on our dignity.

You weren’t able to fight this attack. I mean… let me put it another way. How will you fight this attack? You are always saying amidst yourselves that your lives have amount to nothing. I’m so angry with my father for always speaking like this. And it’s so annoying that his friends are always underlining this almost with a religious fervour.

Ha ha. I see you grew up with a lot of rage. This is not a one-way street. No one wants to be a worker. One becomes a worker. It’s a complex negotiation. You want to carry with yourself your pride, your capacity, your presence, the strength of your collective life, but you also want to keep your children away from this world of labour so they may imagine other worlds. It’s so difficult to sense when this distancing becomes an abyss.

I praise this understanding of yours. But I have a distaste for making helplessness the ground for relationships. It’s dangerous.

I agree. But your rancour, your anger is only further complicating the puzzle. It’s not unravelling much. You can’t change how you grew up. But we can inspire new ways of living. It needs new descriptions.

You just spun around to come back to the same thing — my anger is irrelevant, and all we need is a different description.

Tell me if there is another way. Otherwise we’ll all burn each other down.

Well now you are just scaring me. As if not listening to you will have dire consequences.

Ha ha. Not at all.

Well, let me test a different script and get back to you. Let me ask my friends to seek out some splendid and sparkling moments from the lives of their parents and their friends. And then let them ask, how come these spectacular moments remained as yet unuttered, unheard.

Fms September 2018 by baatein1 on Scribd

It’s Storm-Time; New Descriptions Wanted

FMS#362 || Faridabad-NCR || August 2018

Something’s brewing in my WhatsApp.

Brewing?

Friends write as well as forward lots. They bring many kinds of discernment, intelligence, tenors, reflections, idiocies, and rationalities into my day.

And then you forward them on!

Not everything. I mull over some, save some for later, forward some to close ones, and some to groups.

So listen to one forwarded to me. Though I must say, I get way too many “Good Morning” messages and fruits and flowers.

Ha! Maybe you have the rating of some god and those are offerings!

Maybe. It’s a bit facile. But listen to this message:
Time of life. Time for work. Time of employment. Earth time. Production time. Family time. Lifetime. All these are not irreconcilable. They are uneven.

Uneven? What?!

Don’t mind. Don’t mind. Let him speak. Get into the groove.

Now I see what a forward I got the other day meant. It said:
This isn’t the time for criticism. It is the time to describe anew.

Exactly! I thought we were on the brink of a new description here, which is why, don’t interrupt!

Carry on then.

When I’m by myself, my thoughts circle around my family. What has happened, what is about to happened, what might happen, what I might have missed, what will come next, and so on. My mind drafts different kinds of pictures.

What do you do to break out from this vortex?

That happens when I meet someone else. Some topic jumps at us, and other worlds take over. In a flash the time of the family and the time of the world tremble together.

Tremble? In fear? Or do you mean something else?

No no. Think of the coolness of dawn. Call it a pulse. A quiver. When two flows come close to one another, collide, melt into one another, then a different form emerges. It is neither family, nor world.

Let me. I received a message:
Everything runs on our money, on our hard word. And those who rule over us know this.
I wrote back that everyone knows this, but it remains as a public secret.

Well said.

Wait. Listen to the reply:
It was a public secret. Not any more. No one thinks any longer that power is the be all and end all. No one is waiting for anyone else to do things for them.

This reminds of a message. Let me find it. Oh, here:
Some work so they can eat. Some ask that they be fed. Some loot and eat. Those who loot sermonise. Those who live by hard work keep to themselves. Those who ask stare into eyes.

They announce themselves as honest. They’ve got some license to loot. They don’t even know the definition of ‘worker’. Are we a football? We don’t go begging. We were born to end labour. Petitions and prayers won’t end labour.

That was one storm. Who was that?

Storm-time!

Yeah, this quality of time cannot be tied down, fettered. It stays invisible. But when it appears, it unseats many entrenched ideas.

This storm-time seems connected to the subterranean. Always flowing. It stays out of sight. Eruptions such as these give us a sense of the force that is brewing.

It seems to me this storm-time is in everyone around me. It erupts and ebbs. It’s frequent now.

You think the subterranean brewing is palpable today?

I cannot prove it; I can certainly sense it. I agree with you, a new description is definitely needed.

Fms August 2018 by baatein1 on Scribd

Not Inert, You’re Uranium

FMS#361 || Faridabad-NCR || July 2018

Listen friend.

Continuous, increased production at continually reducing cost. We humans cannot keep up. Neither can Earth.

They’ll bring robots.

And what will they do about the planet? How will they replace it? Earth is this close to losing it on us humans.

So what should we do now?

We just have to start things over.

Which ones?

We have to reinvestigate why humans started production at all.

Not only started, but accelerated. Why?

There’s one ready answer: To control nature, and to make our lives better.

This answer no longer satisfies. Earth is not inert.

This is something I try to hold in my mind all the time, but cannot sense its dimensions in their fullness.

We experience the liveliness of nature. Got stalled by the rain. Felt peace in the shade of a tree. Fainted in hot summer breeze. Teeth clattered in the cold. Which incomprehensible dimensions of the earth?

Coal. Oil. Uranium. Lava. Earthquake. Begin from here, and earth is not inert.

Why this call to take the word ‘inert’ seriously, and also to displace it?

A predicament is shared by all. A pain from the feeling of being seen as inert underlies everything. And a restlessness that the expression of not being inert comes so intermittently.

I’ve been listening to you all quietly all this while. Don’t mind, but this conversation — though interesting — is a bit abstract. How is our living connected to it?

Inert, incapable, lazy, insufficient. These pervade our life. Just recently, 400 permanent workers found the gates of the factory locked on them. Anger, astonishment. And that feeling of having been seen as inert.

That’s there. Do what you can. Go on. Go to the labour department. You’ll get hollow dates and empty assurances. Go to leaders. They’ll advise that you wrap up and calculate your dues. Go to provident fund officers, and they will say they’ll investigate. And in all this, restlessness will rise, and that feeling of being shrunk.

So transparent, and yet the apparatus thinks it cannot be read.

Its masquerades are exhausted. And we can say we are the ones who have exhausted these disguises. The emperor is naked. How come it was a child who saw this?

Wasn’t carrying the weight of the past. Said it as she saw it.

The apparatus calling us inert is one of its masquerades.

Proliferate. Scattering can only be upended by proliferating. Percolate every story, seep into every heart, permeate every mind, radiate from every thought.

There you go becoming abstract again! You mean 400 people are not less. Spread out. In small groups, meet many at factory gates, at the time of entry, at the time of exit, at lunch break, in tea stalls, at neighbourhood gatherings, in buses, in trains, any place. Be uranium.

Apparatus fears this. You’ve always been that dancer who pierces the masquerade.

Fms July 2018 by baatein1 on Scribd

Entrapment of Less

FMS#360 || Faridabad-NCR || June 2018

The company’s lawyer was of the opinion that there is actually no answer to this complaint. He said if someone raises a complaint that she or he has been dismissed without being paid dues, then what answer can there be?

What complaint was it?

One of the few that the Labour Department still receives, and which the department then asks the companies to reply to.

To most workers it’s clear that no relief is going to come to them through the Labour Department. Things have to be resolved at the workplace itself. You have to act precisely and immediately in large groups, or small, within the workplace.

But if one finds oneself alone, then a complaint to the Labour Department does yield a response.

You’re saying a complaint can become a step.

Yes, a complaint can indeed be an effective push.

Intriguing. I’ve always thought of complaints as a negative thing. It’s been my understanding, as you well know, that complaints are like air coolers. They bring the temperature down a notch.

What’s negative in that?

Things stay hanging between hot and cold. They don’t become acts. The onus keeps slipping and gets deferred to someone else, another. But I’m curious about what you’re suggesting.

You might be right, though. And yes, my reading is a bit different.

There’s a debate between us about complaints. Some of us are even convinced that this entire system is standing on the edifice of complaints.

What I have seen of collisions leads me to think that we have to bring in discernment and variation in our reading of complaints.

How?

For instance, a complaint may open out a situation but remain confined to the person who has raised it. A frenzy of activity may begin between the Labour Department and the company on questions of illegalities. The department might then send summons, hearings could be held, and a figure for compensation begins to hover in the air. The company makes an offer to the worker, hoping to wrap things up. At this juncture, the shape things will take depends both on that worker’s ability to quicken his steps and keep the pressure on the company, as well as make an assessment of how long he is going to be able to keep this up.

In all this one also has to keep the mind still, and life running.

And everyone has ways by which they make an assessment of these capacities in oneself. It’s an awareness one may have about oneself, and yet it blurs when regarding others.

Only to find a deposit of it in some leader!

True, true. But I was hinting at another dimension. Everyone has an expectation of the scale and striving to which they think. They wait for it to emerge, and stay in anticipation of it. This sense envelops our own and collective acts at all times.

So your claim is that when we talk through or listen to a language of complaints, we are making an assessment of, or critiquing, or are in exasperation of the qualities of scale & striving that we find ourselves in.

For instance if I thought that this act of mine will enable 40 of my co-worker to join me…

But found only 15 in my support. It is here that a disappointment settles in, an anger and a litany of complaints takes over. Is this what you are hinting at?

No. I am hinting at not being able to read the enabling of 15 to stand and act with me. I’m talking about seeing this as less. And seeing the interval of this moment as less and as being of no consequence. Everything falls as less. 15… 500… 1000… 4000… 100,000. Always less. It is endless, this entrapment of less.

Sometimes we do laugh at each other on this disjoint.

Scale becomes everything and the intricacies and play of steps get de-valued. It’s self harm. Complaints trouble me.

Complaints are froth. Flotsam. Floating over what?

Over how we consider and regard one another.

Let’s all begin again!!

Fms June 2018 by baatein1 on Scribd

Between Waste and Food

FMS#359 || Faridabad-NCR || May 2018

O-0-o-oh uncle! Don’t press so hard; the pain is unbearable.

Crystals have accumulated in the soles of your feet.

Crystals!? Where from?

They’re residues of waste. The body discards through sweat, urine, shit, breath, menstrual blood, but what gets left behind forms crystals in the body. I try and locate them in the soles of your feet to remove them. The pain you are feeling is the crystals dissolving.

O-0-o-oh uncle! There’s a huge problem in how waste is thought about and acted on in our society.

What problem?

It is sensed by all but remains unthought. And it keeps becoming a bigger and more tangled knot. If it is brought into debate, much will uncoil and unfurl. If you think about shit you’ll see layer upon layer of cruelty and violence. Something as natural as shit has so many curtains drawn over it.

In factories thought about toilets is less, and prohibitions on going to the toilet are more.

That which is natural, and which comes from everyone, has been imposed upon a few and kept out of thought. O-0-o-oh!

The ESI hospital building in Okhla has a mountain of the city’s waste right beside it.

Everyone has seen that mountain. Everyone has seen the bodies at work on it. Everyone has seen fans in the hospital throw its air on patients. The bigger it gets in the world, the more it recedes from thought.

From the soles of your feet it seems to me the same can be said of food. What do you eat? You can shit well only if you eat well. Once the stomach becomes light, the heart turns buoyant.

Uncle now you are joking. Place and time to eat are uncertain for us. And the quality too.

Listen. When my children were little, the house used to run on his — uncle’s — earnings. I used to cook, but he used to be so satisfied with canteen food that taking food to work from home never occurred to him. Today my son, my daughter, and I work. We don’t have time, and we run around to cook food to take to work with us. None of us trust the canteen.

Aunty, did uncle brag a bit much, you think? I’ve never heard of workers having that kind of control over quality of food in factories. O-0-o-oh uncle! Are you pressing in anger now?

Ha ha ha! Not at all! So listen: Egg curry once a week, and once a week meat, one day kheer-puri, and one day kadhi-rice along with kidney beans or lentils, salad, vegetables, four chapatis, and thick yogurt. We’d talk about the quality of food in different factories. And if we heard praise for food in another canteen, we’d insist we get what they have. Once in a while we’d even take some snacks — samosa or bread pakora or chicken — home with us. And you won’t believe the ruckus we created if the daal was watered down!

You’re saying quality and nutrition of food were part of daily conversation? That has withered away, uncle.

I don’t think it’s withered away. The conversation has been shrunk, been turned into the family’s responsibility, even reduced into becoming every individual’s own effort. This, when it is something that should be debated publicly and by all, so that the infrastructures around food become robust, address life as a feast.

Food has got divorced from nourishment, and even embellished food is look at with despondency.

This ties back to what you were saying earlier about waste. Attitudes towards food and towards waste seem similar. These attitudes overlap at weddings, and the line between food and waste gets blurred. The human body becomes the vanishing point between the two.

Uncle, I am feeling the cure-rest of dissolving crystals. I think I might sleep now. I wonder if food and waste will carry on in my dreams.

Let them. In dreams, thoughts germinate.

Fms May 2018 by baatein1 on Scribd

It is Us, It is You, It is All

FMS#358 || Faridabad-NCR || April 2018

We are proud that we are ramblers. We can speak, and receive, the unconnected and the unaccompanied.

Hold on boss! Let me consult the thesaurus.

Do it on your mobile.

Wanderer. Roamer. Itinerant. Wayfarer. Drifter. Voyager. Vagabond.

So Mr. Proud, are you suggesting these are quirks and spins in thoughts, both yours and mine?

Nothing is straight and continuous?

Sure, for a moment or two. And then they flow. As clamour. As uproar. As silence. As frozen. As delirium. As mourning. As rage. As joy. As lethargy. As radiance. As spark. And the thrilling thing is, they are simultaneous, as well as out of sync with one another.

Like my laughter clashing with your moan. Like my desire for the dark entangling with your fears.

That’s very poetic. But it’s a digression. We’re trying to think here.

Oh dear. Really? About what?

What do you mean ‘about what’? It’s clear. How do we know we are with each other in thought? For example, when we are in friendship, it gets expressed through words. But our sense of connection and companionship blurs when we try to think of ourselves in thought with one another.

I see the problem. Where emotion is clearly demarcated — e.g., he burst out, or she rejoiced — there the thought-speech connect is legible. But readings get determined by the expressed emotion, and thought recedes.

To me the problem is — When do we become aware of the qualities of our life forces? And by that I mean, together, with each other.

Often when someone is telling me something on the phone I find there is, one, a sense of urgency, two, a clear analysis of the immediate occurrence that delimits life at that point, and three, an astonishment.

This must hold for all.
Urgency /
Clarity on the immediate /
Astonishment.

There’s another thing — Sometimes in a formation, these three happen together. And by that I mean together, between many, with each other. I have seen this. Something flows. It’s momentary, and it can also happen over time. It dissolves many hesitations.

It’s a rejuvenation. An astonishment alerts and affirms that it is in us, it is in you, it is in all.

The twin whips of tension and torture keep attacking this radiance. It’s tough!

Tough! Why? Almost everyday I stand amidst thousands and see this paper carried by a wave. I sense a radiance. It comes near through words, but scattered, as fragments.

Yes, I run into you in different places in a month. It feels nice. And I read the paper, and sense language tussling to make space and make words for this wave, this radiance.

We are proud that we are ramblers. Everyone and all are ramblers. There is a churning all around.

Radiance is intermittent. Keep it alive. Hold on to it. Transmit it.

April FMS 358 7-4-18 by baatein1 on Scribd

With Regard to the Best in All

FMS#357 || Faridabad-NCR || March 2018

Tell me something. Why do you keep repeating that a “worker” doesn’t understand this, won’t follow that, has no interest in the first page, can’t do this, wouldn’t do that, works against own interest?

I too hear you say this all the time. It makes me want to ask you who this “worker” is.

You both sound like you want to pick a fight with me. By “worker” I don’t mean any one person; I am talking about a general lack of understanding. I call them workers who are not able to grasp complexities.

So then according to you, when many “workers” stop work together in the middle of the day, they do so because of a lack of understanding? Is it because of an inability to grasp complexity and with no understanding of how things will unfold?

No. I’ve been part many such milieus myself. In these moments a lot is at stake, so naiveté is not an option. But things are different in the routine of living and working.

So then according to you, thought is an outcome of stakes. The higher the stakes, the better the thought; you lower the stakes, and thought vanishes.

I feel we stay quiet about the inner stakes we have about life. They remain inaudible. Own stakes are hidden, others’ stakes are screened. All that remains, all that gets sung, is who’s high, who’s less.

The two of you have taken my words into some unwarranted directions. Like it happens every time I try to talk to someone, here too I am failing.

Don’t be frustrated. This debate is old. If we set the bar low for each other, then that is what we’ll see and what we’ll find. On the other hand, if I were to look at her and think, this is someone who has the capacity to draw the experiences of a hundred workplaces from twenty-five people, and who can express experiences of as many as ten workplaces at a time to twenty-five people in exceptional ways, and who reads fat books, then I will not be able to think of her as naive. I mean, if I still do, then it would be my own naiveté.

I want to add another dimension to this conversation. The “worker” you speak of today has nothing to do with labour courts. Today managements take all disputes to the criminal court. Some thousands are in jail from not having been granted bail. So many are in jail following absurd legal judgements. Is this because they are emitting naiveté?

I want to add something as well — All those entering the world of work today have dexterity with language, technology, forms of conversation. They have an agility both with making groups, and with becoming part of groups.

Let me also add something — You only need to read crime reports in newspapers, or news about boys and girls who elope to see how even reporters think of young workers as being highly intelligent and courageous. It is when they don’t understand a situation or an event, that they sense intelligence and courage.

That is so true. When one doesn’t understand something, instead of admonishing and ridiculing, appreciate the mystery, allow the attraction, praise the intelligence and courage, and view the other person with equality.

All of you seem to be suggesting that my thoughts run counter to my experience.

By falling in with the routine divide — where the commonplace is considered very low, and anything out of the ordinary is thought worthy of hyperboles — we suspend each other in limbo land.

It would be good practice to give thought velocity by paying attention to, and giving regard to, the best of an individual or a collective, gathering, or group.

That, after all, is life.

FMS_357_Mar_2018 by baatein1 on Scribd

What is Fuel

FMS#356 || Faridabad-NCR || February 2018

I heard a sermon.

Since when have you started listening to sermons! You’re always saying, “Everyone’s a thinker, no sermon necessary.”

I still hold that view. But this sermon emerged in a context and about questions that were both poignant and significant. So, in that moment, I softened my stance.

What a turn! Do elaborate.

A crowd had gathered. It was near the railway crossing. Word was, three young men had died, cut on the train track. They were crossing after their shift. The crowd was restless. Everyone crosses these tracks daily. It was as if everyone felt the loss of a limb.

Then?

One young man was speaking. He had everyone engrossed. He kept stuttering on the word ‘cut’. There was a trembling in his voice. His words were considered, as if he had tested many of them, chiseled his language.

You seem to have been very moved both by the milieu and the persona. Sermon is your shorthand for what you felt.

You may be right. But it did seem sermons held a sway on his manner of speaking. He dwelled upon, elaborated and multiplied the word ‘cut’ from and into so many directions that everyone became distraught.

We use the word ‘cut’ often between us.

And he was aware of that. Bodies get dismembered. Humans are hostile to nature. Hands sever from bodies. Childhood shrinks from minds, and compassion withdraws from intelligence. Life resources are dwindled from lives. Humans separate from humans. Humans become antagonistic to machines.

Wow, it’s like everyone would have encountered the force of their own cuts.

And even though I’m sitting so far away, I can sense the power of cuts just from your narration.

That’s probably why we are drawn to thought that extends and enlarges us in moments of difficulty and peril, makes us dig our heels in, sends thought coursing through bodies without differentiating between them.

Something like that. The pain of a cut, the hope of departure, the anxiety of estrangement, the desire for an opening, the anger of exclusion, the joy of an epiphany — everything was cooking in the cauldron. And the fuel? Say?

What was it?

Well let me try! Land was divided. People and land were sundered. Took a train, turned away from the village.

Still, what is the fuel? Descriptions are important. They are in abundance with everyone. Every description is also a description of the fuel.

People have been going from here to elsewhere for hundreds of years. The songs of parting from the beloved and songs of ships rocking at sea stitch the fabric of life.

So are you saying musicality is fuel?

Well, you’ve hijacked my line of thinking! But this direction too is intriguing. It seems there is no one fuel.

Some fuels march in procession. Some fuels burn. Some fuels flow subterraneously like molten lava.

And lava that surges unpredictably like your thoughts? What is that called?

I’m in search of a name, my friend. I’m in search of its name. Once I have it, it will dislodge settled forms. It’s just that I haven’t found its name yet. I experience it, can give a description of it, I sense it, feel it coursing, recognise its resonance, can mark it in different acts.

Let’s keep searching, thinking, talking, dear seismologist.

FMS 356 - 06. Feb. 2018 by baatein1 on Scribd

Imagined Courthouse (& its Contempts)

FMS#355 || Faridabad-NCR || January 2018

I received a very well composed message on WhatsApp the other day. It was elaborate, full of detail, and rich in feeling. It was a message exhausted by complaint.

What was it about? At what time did you receive it?

In the afternoon. It was about a few things. The crux was the cruel ways of extracting work. And it was about young workers and students of Industrial Training Institutes who are taken in as apprentices by companies.

Why are you calling it an exhaustion of complaint?

Because the message lists the many steps taken to register complaints. First with the supervisor, then HR department, then ITI teacher, then principal, and then the District Magistrate.

And you’re saying the level of exhaustion is directly proportionate to the number and stage of complaints filed.

The thing is, experience tells us that the procedures of complaint-making don’t work. Mostly, complaints get ignored. This is common knowledge. Even so, it is through the language of complaints that a critical edge is presented.

Let me get this. You are saying we know complaints don’t work and yet our very mode of expressing ourselves is by complaining.

It puzzles me how those who have sharp observations and thoughts become plaintiffs when they speak and write. As if they are standing in and addressing an imagined courthouse.

And you’re saying this a kind of habit of living that must be investigated.

At one level, it is evaluated on a daily basis. ‘We are not being heard’ and ‘there is no justice’ are things that come up all the time in everyday conversation.

No, she’s saying something else. It may be part of everyday conversation that complaints don’t work, but that’s not the same as investigating it. Because it’s true, whenever we step up to express a thought or a critique, we surrender to a language of complaints and petitions. The plaintiff lives on.

This riddle can perhaps be thought through a few questions — about why complaints have such a sway over our lives; about concepts which we think through when complaints fail; and about languages that get sidelined by the dominance of complaints and petitions.

There are languages that cut through. Just last week I saw a picture in a newspaper — faces lit up with laughter. You get it — in a newspaper!

Yes, yes. In a newspaper. Carry on.

They were faces of young people who opened up the toll gate because they were not paid their wages. No one had to pay the toll. For four hours. And laughed for the photograph in the newspaper.

I have to say, laughing and dancing faces ruffle up settled relations of power.

It’s a contempt of the imagined courthouse.

Maybe this is how language escapes efficacious comfort zones.

What does that mean?

Well, it just came to me. How do I explain it! When we accept hierarchies of social stations, take them as stable, unmovable, unbreakable, and let pulpit-heads dominate, we’re well within efficacious comfort zones. I do think there are many cracks in this, much seepage, but some phantoms hang heavy.

Cruel intelligence uses these phantoms with great efficiency. Stay in your place, it reprimands. You won’t get any more time than this, it commands.

And yet these lines do keep breaking.

Only to be hastily repaired.

And then they break again.

How often, how much must they break before the repairers will be exhausted?

FMS 355 a January 2018 by baatein1 on Scribd

A Driver Asserts a World-Picture

FMS#354 || Faridabad-NCR || December 2017

I saw an arresting scene in a film. As if it was for you. As if it were you speaking.

That so?

A woman worker in a factory in 1970s Germany astutely reads the management.

What’s her reading?

Two axes. One, that the management remains always enveloped in a fearful anticipation of our sudden collective halts, breaks, ruptures.

Ha ha. It’s always winters; they are always in search of the security of the quilt.

And second, that whenever management feels jammed in its bargaining with us, it presents itself as a social enterprise engulfed by, and helpless in the face of, global forces.

Has a sudden realisation!

Becomes immediately social!

Quickly global!

Turns melodramatically ‘for everyone’!

It gains expeditious nirvana!

Such is the latchkey of capital. When under pressure, evoke global crisis. Say market is turbulent. Plead defencelessness. Cry unbridled competition. Quote all that is solid melts into air.

With that, they also find themselves relieved of the burden of surveilling workers and issuing reprimands one by one about how they are lazy, inattentive, incapable, and not as good as the machines they work. But at the same time, their control over the workplace also slips, becomes dishevelled.

Their confidence also melts into air.

One keeps hearing these days about companies that any of them might vanish any day. And this understanding is quite prevalent too, that companies belong to no one.

A friend of mine who drives Uber-Ola keeps trying to explain to his customers that the car is neither his, nor the customer’s, or even the company’s. The car is in his name, but it is mortgaged to a bank, and he pays monthly instalments on it. Then, also, a part of his income goes to the company as commission. The idea and the software are the company’s, but even those are linked to ideas and software of other companies. And as is the case with all companies, many companies will have invested in this company. And some of what is invested will have been accessed as loans.

Today there is a lot of chatter about banks and companies going bankrupt.

That is why my driver friend says that he himself is a pressure point. He senses the ups and downs both of the company and, through his customers, the world.

Does he feel pressure, or does he assert it?

Both. The pressure of the company’s ups and downs act on him. He keeps his customers in conversation about this. He says that creating an environment where pressure can be sensed and considered, is to create the conditions in which pressure can be exerted.

In cricket they say that you have to build pressure to create an environment in which a wicket can be taken.

There is a deep pleasure in bringing into conversation the world picture that emerges from ones own life and work. People enter such conversations very quickly, and build links with it.

This world-picture aspect of our lives sometimes amazes us, and sometimes makes us curious. Sometimes it feels beyond comprehension. Sometimes it troubles. Sometimes it feels obvious. And sometimes it exhilarates.

In winters this region gets a world-picture from birds. Enjoy it.

Of course.

FMS 355 a January 2018 by baatein1 on Scribd