Confidence of Many

FMS#371 || Faridabad-NCR || May 2019

Listen to this message I received: A heat wave courses through our factories this summer. Battles overflow from shopfloors onto streets. In one factory, permanent workers and supervisors were beaten up by temporary workers. Police. Permanent workers concede not to pressurise temporary workers when they refuse work. Day before yesterday, the MD circulated a memo to the staff: “It’s not right to issue dismissals with immediate effect. A 15-day notice should be given, so alternative work can be sought.” This is when till now the attitude has been to issue prompt dismissals at 2 AM!

Wah! An excellent description of today's milieu. There's a sense of current fluctuations in temperature around productivity.

We all sense these fluctuations. But describing them requires a certain observation and focus.

In a way this message expresses our collective achievement.

What do you mean?

There’s an image of many in the message. There’s a clamour. Collisions. Decisions. Changes. This is what collective is. And I say achievement because it has a confidence, a confidence of many.

This capacity — taking sharp decisions, taking decisions quickly — is an attribute of the new generation. Their idea of time is different. Perhaps the hold of institutions and organisations has weakened.

My neighbour works with an old insurance agent. He was laughing and telling us how today young people want policies lasting only five or ten years, no more. They tell him, who knows what lies ahead. Earlier people used to hear him out on 25 and 30 year policies.

There's one more angle to the liveliness of this message. It has a whiff of 2011 and 2012. The debates and arguments on time and pressure. We understood so much, when for ten days we de-occupied factories of the management’s control. We listened to each other, saw one another.

So in the last ten years, you’re saying, these debates and discussions have taken on new guises and seeped into daily, common conversations?

Yes. Everywhere, this fluctuation, this shift in temperature appears as an intonation, an accent, a shade in conversations. Such-and-such a thing happened in this factory. That thing happened in that factory. This happening and that occurrence, in this locality, in that city, in that region — these appear in the expanse of conversations. They make milieus.

It’s where the elan of this message comes from.

Fms May 2019 by on Scribd