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
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