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

The Making of Intimate Affinities

FMS#370 || Faridabad-NCR || April 2019

Today was amazing. Talked a full 54 minutes on the phone.

How come you managed that kind of time in duty hours?

There’s been a salary delay. So we all decided not to appear for work. A few hours, and we’re getting messages that salary is ready for disbursal tomorrow.

So simple. No tension. Enjoying the luxury of hour-long conversations. Is this for real?

Dost, I am now 24-years-old. Have been working for about eight years. The most effective acts are those which are made in a collective way with the expansive elasticity of freedom. This much I’ve understood. Like todays’ decision of not going to work. The salary delay was going on for a week. Will give half. Half later. Very irritating. So we all decided to withdraw for a day.

Now! When did this step become so simple! Word spreads between 1500 co-workers, a decision gets made, and acted on. And all this within a shift change? Remarkable.

This is no surprise. It’s common. We’ve done this many times. Ask any worker from any factory. It could be a 100-worker workplace or a 15,000-worker workplace. I bet that rare would be a worker who has not been part of at least one such moment. Rather, many times will be the norm. One can keep thinking the why’s and how’s of this, but no one can deny that it happens.

But you are also saying that this step is without tension. Rather, that it is with degrees of freedom. Are you saying that underlying this is a shared understanding of precise effects through minimum effort?

Listening to all of you it strikes me that these steps bear a deep impulse — an impulse of commoning and the making of intimate affinities.

Say more?

We sense it most in moments such as these. That’s why when you talked to your friend on the phone, you listened. Didn’t interrupt. Weren’t restless to have your own advice heard. This capacity is drawn from the commons of intimate affinities.

Yes, the conversation went very well. She shared the upswings and downswings of the last five years — her decisions, her promises, her doubts, her resolves. Yes, true, I did listen with care and patience. If this is because of an intimacy that comes from commoning, where else would we sense it?

Well, like when someone hums a tune and everyone picks it up?

Aaha! So the tune is important? That’s dangerous.

Agreed. If the tune comes hemmed in within a boundary, it does strike a suicidal blow. It exhausts.

Yes, if seen as boundary just of place. But if considered in the flow of time? Small acts, their repetition, their murmurs change the course, intensity, and recognition of the act itself.

Acts repeat. They appear here, then elsewhere. They get heard in another somewhere. They are borrowed here and there. They allow a discarding of other acts. They travel around and emerge somewhere as new, exciting. No one is held up on a pedestal in this viral process of commoning.

They are disobedient.

Of commands!

Irreverential of pedestals.

Heretical.

These affinities, these intimacies of commoning emerge in the force of our acts that persuade us out of the hold of commands.

When we push commands and pedestals away, to the edges.

This is also a way of seeing human experience.

This cannot be lived through or thought in sad or mourning ways. These are to be felt and lived with exuberance.

Fms April 2019 by baatein1 on Scribd

What's the Issue?

FMS#369 || Faridabad-NCR || March 2019

Who says, “What’s the issue”?

“Issue”, meaning?

Hello, I don’t know any issue.

Ooh! Issue means a case, an event. Some can be big. Some are small.

So, what’s your issue?

Speak softly. Issue is serious and ears are trained.

Relax. The sounds of these machines will keep our voices hidden from surveilling ears.

I’ve heard that they do ear exercises.

That’s their issue. How to keep ears alert.

These machine-worshippers never care for machines. Sounds will keep on growing.

It’s a circle. Alertness of ears. Sound of machine. Wear and tear of ears. Sound of machine rising. More alertness needed from ears. And on and on.

So this is your issue?

No. This is the issue that haunts cruel intelligence.

Aah! Speak softly. Electricity is gone; the generator will be on soon; speak then. But, what’s your issue?

Accident report. I’ve started understanding what accident report is. It’s crucial to get a written version. When an accident, do two things. One group, quick, go help. And the other group, go get the accident report written. Take copies.

You’ve thought a lot on this. So it does not remain an issue for you then.

What is issue? A kind of a knot? A complex knot? Or something else?

In my understanding, when we say ‘issue’, it’s about some kind of a dispute. Like if there’s a dispute about an accident.

Disputes are many. So are we swimming in issues then?

Softly please! This is interesting indeed. You will ask, why? Well, many disputes are contingent, they are relevant at the moment they are occurring. They have opposing sides, wrestlers and spokespersons.

Are you saying that some disputes becomes issues, and recede from us?

That’s their doubleness. Fluctuations of disputes stay within us in many formless ways. But if they are within us, the question becomes, who needs, who propels the turning of disputes into issues?

What I gather is that giving a form brings in a degree of control, a sense of being in power. It gives a perforated world an artifice of legibility.

But along with it an image of a collective gets created too.

Agreed, a collective image emerges. But this image is always a blur. The transformation of our world is rapid. Issues bubble up, and quickly dissipate. Some do reap short-term advantage from this momentariness.

The collective image is perforated; underneath it flow lively, alive, robust disputes with “no demands”.

We keep taking steps, acting, and do not articulate any demand. This happens in our workplace, in many workplaces, all the time. This confuses the management, makes it fearful.

Our self-confidence grows.

fms March 2019 by baatein1 on Scribd

It’s Musk; What Boundaries?

FMS#368 || Faridabad-NCR || February 2019

Just look at this video meme I received.

I too have something to show. You go first.

It’s a video that 70,000 years ago humans started walking from a place in Africa. They kept walking. Kept spreading, kept going, and reached many different places. They’re still walking. And now stand at 7 billion.

Wow! Mine is connected, kind of. There are deer that keep roaming, walking, running in search of the source of an intoxicating fragrance. Everywhere they go, they can smell it. Their search takes them to many places. This fragrance comes from a gland within the deer themselves. And so it is that they find this fragrance everywhere they go.

What’s intriguing is that humans resent the roaming of deer, keep them circumscribed within reserved and demarcated zones.

By the way, humans have a big problem with walking. They keep producing boundaries. All kinds of boundaries that occlude time horizons.

Nicely said. ‘Time horizon’. Heard this after so long. I’m also liking the ease with which both of you were talking about 70,000 years. It brought in an elegant ‘time shadow’ to the making of the seven billion that we are today.

Hello, why are you continuously checking your phone? What’s up?

An ordinary urgency. A message from our work group that tomorrow we’re all not going for duty. We do this between us around once every 10 to 15 days. It keeps pressure on the management.

It’s the same in the factory next door. Workers do this collective not-reaching once in ten days. They say it’s the most ordinary and easiest form in which to keep acting. It builds tremendous force.

It has fragrance, spreads fragrance!

Yesterday we all got entangled in a puzzle. This discussion on musk that you’re having makes me feel that you’ll enjoy it.

Well. Go on then. It’s always fun to hear puzzles on fragrance.

A friend was describing how the slayer-worshiper, cruel intelligence imposed a fine on a bright young woman. She has this beautiful quality of generously listening to each and every one, and also of speaking with care. Gives time. Gives attention. Is a friend who cares for all.

Where is the riddle?

A puzzle is in the making. The fine imposed on her was because of these very attributes. The management argues that, since they are the ones giving wage, only their well-being should matter and no one should be distracted by, or into, any other form of well-being.

Oh, I get it. The question you are asking is, what is the extent of the wager of wage?

Yup! What’s wage for? It’s not given as charity. There’s an exchange with work done. Lots of work, less money. Then from where this command of boundaries?

Many a time, work stops. We work, you pay wages, then why this abusive language?

A clash with boundaries is on at all times. No, let me reframe that — It’s through collisions that boundaries get made, extended, and broken. In a strange way we are boundary worshippers. And we also get claustrophobic with boundaries.

Meanwhile, humans continue in a state of walking. They are spreading. They are mixing in unimaginable ways. We walked from a small place in Africa and spread to become a few billion. How can you say we are boundary worshippers!

Think about it. If the deer did not get into a search of the fragrance of musk, they wouldn’t have roamed the world. Instead, they’d have got stuck in one place, would have got fat, immobile, and unrecognisable as deer.

Well said! When my grandmother would say of someone that they emit the fragrance of musk, she was giving great regard to these qualities, of searching and roaming, in that person.

Fms February 2019 by baatein1 on Scribd

New, Renew, Anew

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