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

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FMS #351 | Turbulent, Fertile Gap | Faridabad-NCR, September 2017

Go on! Make a film.

Seriously? On whom?

On me.

Why?

You don’t believe, eh, that I can think of myself in the role of a heroine in a film?

No, that’s not it. I’m surprised because you always think against the ‘hero’.

How do you enter a script without being a hero? It’s a puzzle. If you’re not a hero, you won’t get lines through which to speak what you think. And if you do become a hero, you’ll be asked to speak lines that are against the basis of life itself.

Then become an anti-hero!

That’s a possibility. Anti-heroes get some lines of their own. But those are then tied to some inner wound. The cry of the wound fuels the import of the speech.

Deep wounds invariably come up in regular conversations. The idea has presence and influence.

If protagonists draw on this, and yet refuse to become the heroine, and refuse to accept anyone as heroes? Then what happens?

There is a script here that’s refusing to become a script.

A little like us. You become a worker, but do not desire to be a worker. This counter-current never settles.

What are you saying? Is it that the foundry, the casting, is always partial and incomplete, and it is in this incompleteness that the ‘new’ emerges?

And you want us to recognise that this incompleteness faces the open, the multiple.

And that the gap between consent and refusal is turbulent. It is fertile. Always germinating. This gap is never empty.

Exciting! Time for tea for all. And also, my question: When do we sense the force and the pressure of this gap the most? Let me clarify that I do understand that we sense the heat waves of this fluctuation everyday. My question is, when do these waves travel between us to become rebellious love for life?

You always tease us with a puzzle as you pose a question. Like a song that asks how a song came to be. Questions and puzzles are what make us travel each day in search of many.

And we know this concretely. A murmur may start at a department. It then travels quickly to other departments. It gathers a storm rapidly; it fluctuates.

These storms do not have a hero. Not many words get spoken. They make tremendous impact.

How do you make a script out of this? Few words. When the wave started, when it became visible, when it rose, when it engulfed — all this stays outside the image. It is neither an event, nor is it transparent.

No hero. No herione.

But many songs.

And hard-edged counter attacks.

Incarceration, courts, and dates. An imposed exhaustion.

Maybe some heroes can make an entry here to help explain the exhaustion back to you!

The instant we draw energy from the gap and break through the threshold of codes that partition life, law-givers become crazed and go into overdrive. With punishment. With lectures on moral codes.

And many words are exiled from the dictionary. Rebellion, revolt, rebel, refusal.

Faridabad Majdoor Samachar (Faridabad Workers’ News)
Issue # 351
September 2017

Page 1: Turbulent, Fertile Gap
Page 2: Many Thoughts Amidst Conversations with Many
Page 3: Claim your Bonus; Commoning; Accidents
Page 4: Surajpur, Noida: Mayapuri, Delhi

Sept_2017 by baatein1 on Scribd