FMS#367 || Faridabad-NCR || January 2019
A friend of ours routinely bursts out while working on the line: It’s soaring, it’s soaring, it’s soaring, it’s soaring, it’s soaring!
Doesn’t that just drive the managers insane?
They never confront him on it. Sometimes all of us join in. It’s soaring, it’s soaring, it’s soaring, it’s soaring, it’s soaring!
Increase, increase, increase! That’s how managers get their promotions. How are they going to stop such a chant.
Soaring is such a good word. Like it has both desire and the fulfilment of desire.
It has character; it has abundance. A song bursting with qualities of life.
It does suggest resources, and their measures.
And an astonishment too, that amidst today’s excess of wealth, living is such an effort.
It’s also a question of the attributes of resources for living. What kind of drains, what kind of a toilet, what kind of places to dance in, what kind of a shared oven, what kind of tea shop, what kind of seats in a bus.
Means and reserves become expressed. Like time emerges as a resource.
Now whose resource is time?
It’s a resource in production. And duty time! Machines must run nonstop on their fullest speeds. What is time here if not a resource?
There’s another way of going about this. Listen. Time is both fertile and fallow. We need time to be both, and we want both.
It has been said a long, long time ago, that the qualities of life of a place can be discerned from how much time that place gives to refining and recombining itself, and how much time it spends sustaining and mending itself.
There is a place in our neighbourhood that thrives with festivities in someone’s life, every day.
A friend of mine says that cruel intelligence keeps trying to block off the celebration of life. She has a fascinating observation that this society is made up of—she calls them wadh-pujak—worshipers of those who kill, who slay. Justice, reasoning, and dissonance do not sit well with cruel intelligence.
The ways to quell justice and dissonance are many. Cut wages, issue a fine, suspend, get someone roughed up, squash their spirit, kill them. That's a slayer’s discourse.
This is a language for separating a part of yourself, making it other, and killing that part.
A student asked herself a beautiful question. ‘How is it that I can bring others into my thought only in the language of question and answer? Why can I not imagine an equality of exchanges?’
You know that thing about time that we were just taking about? That is where the problem lies. The world is made unequal in the partition of time itself.
You succumb to a language of questions and answers when you see another only as if circumscribed in maintaining their life.
And when you conjure another as if they are in search of refinement of life? Then it becomes a possibility of a conversation.
It’s soaring, it’s soaring, it’s soaring, it’s soaring, it’s soaring.
fms January 2019 by baatein1 on Scribd
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