Escape Velocity Unattainable

 Feb 23, 2021

 

Three weeks have passed since I last wrote here. 

 

I’ve felt boxed in and scattered most of this time. How can one feel both? Boxed in and scattered seem to be different states. Hmm…

 

I've felt boxed in by time constraints, never seeming to have enough of it to do the things I want to. Never enough boundless time to sink into and absorb myself within things waiting to be decided (one huge one being the revision strategy for my book). Things in my control perhaps, but needing churning and mixing to resolve. Things that cannot be decided by practical, logical considerations but require that touch of intuitiveness or insight that comes often from immersion. I go in deep into those things and feel on the verge of breakthrough but then the time bubble pops and my immersion bubble with it. I surface with things in the same morass as before.

 

And the number of things, I must do, I want to do, as well as the things that hover, and disintegrate, keep increasing.... Dispersing the mind, not allowing the body to ground… Rushing, and rushing more, physically and internally…

 

So yes, boxed and scattered does makes sense together. Additionally, I lost time in these three weeks. Really hadn’t a clue where chunks went. It happens I know. But I woke one morning feeling like Sisyphus chained in eternal, futile labour.

 

I reached out to my friend, the one who offers his time, ‘to talk it out’. I kept saying, ‘I am a mess, I am a mess, I am a mess,’ not aloud, but I think he heard it.

 

In our talk he told me two things that helped. 

 

He shared a conversation he had with friends in which they discovered how they were stuck by centripetal forces, orbiting around some issues, never being able to break the cyclical movement and fly free of the central objects. Yes, those huge issue-objects with their powerful forces could not be escaped from. All one could do was wait in readiness for that moment when extra force, external or internal, that could help attain escape velocity would suddenly make its presence felt. That image helped me. Remain alert like a warrior to use that moment, I could do that.

 

We then talked of the huge objects in our life that we were circling. The ones we didn’t have control over but couldn’t just drop either. Laying them out in plain view was good.

 

He also told me that another friend told him that she survived the stresses of covid by compartmentalizing. ‘But that is unhealthy,’ I said. ‘A psychological coping mechanism that can lead to dissonance and other things.’ But the woman who had told him that meant in meditative, mindful terms — just staying in the moment with full attention to what one was currently doing. I will try it, I decided. I found it particularly useful to stay fully in those moments of pleasure, without dissipating away into the circles of worry and anxiety about things outside my control, or perhaps within but things I had no influence over and had to orbit. I managed to enjoy deeply my first post covid film with friends — we even drank a bottle of wine with our popcorn — and share Lo Hei and a meal with them. 

 

I enjoyed other things too, like spending two hours with paper and colour pencils where temporarily I felt I had escaped from the orbit, though I also knew where I really was.

 

Some other nice things happened. The nicest was that a friend in Bombay added me to an email group of people who wanted to talk about the angst and hope they felt about happenings in India. It was just the place I needed to be to survive the orbit around my strongest force-field.

 

Waiting yet to reach escape velocity for the things that can be escaped.

Farmers and Policemen and Barricades

  

Feb 3, 2021

 

Last evening after I was done with my retreat, I turned on the news and saw this image. Not at the border of India with Pakistan or China (with whom we are engaged in a border conflict currently), but outside Delhi, to barricade the farmers into their protest sites. Iron spikes, concrete walls, trenches and barbed wire. 

 

There are many ways of telling this story…

 

On Republic Day farmers rammed into the Red Fort, attacking Policemen, and throwing down the Indian Tricolour thus hurting the sentiments of 1.30 crore Indians. They replaced the Indian flag on the ramparts with a Khalistani one. Four hundred policemen were hospitalized on that day. A farmer also attacked a Policeman with a sword. The Police had no choice but to fence in the protesting farmers who have shown stubbornness in the face of the Government’s willingness to dialogue with them. The Prime Minister has even set up a direct phone line to him that any farmer can pick up and call from. The protesting farmers, from just one or two states of India, are being maximalists and refusing to compromise, thus harming the interests of millions of farmers from other parts of India who are in favor of the new laws. Those protesting haven’t even defined exactly what they want from the Government. They are just puppets manipulated by opposition parties, anti-nationalists, the Left, China or Pakistan. The Police were also forced to file FIRs against farmer leaders. Some farmers are in jail.

 

The story could also be told in another way…

 

Desperate farmers who had been peacefully protesting the New Farm Laws on several borders of Delhi for the last two months are now being boxed into their protest sites by barricades, trenches, barbed wire and iron spikes. Internet, electricity, water, and other supplies have been cut off. On Jan 26^th a breakaway group of rebel farmers had broken police barricades and proceeded to the Red Fort. The Tricolour had not been touched, as some are reporting, but the Nishan Sahib flag had been put up alongside it. Four hundred policemen were allegedly injured in this confrontation. Majority of the farmers though participated in the tractor march in a peaceful manner and condemned the actions of the few farmers who had entered the Fort. Since then, the Police have cracked down on the borders in an attempt to force farmers to vacate the sites but an emotional appeal from one of the leaders has intensified the protests and more farmers have joined in. Five days ago, despite Police presence, a group of men broke into the farmer site at Singhu and broke their washing machines and attacked the farmers in their tents. In the conflict a Policeman was injured by a farmer using a sword to protect himself. Farmer leaders have been charged under the draconian UAPA. A former Police Commissioner while defending the actions of the Police has also said that both these decisions, to allow tractors into Delhi and to barricade the farmers, were Political decisions and not Policing ones. He said that the Government should stop using the Police as their face. 

 

Same stories, but I suppose if I read one and not the other, I would build a certain idea about the Police and the Farmers. The first sympathises with the Police, the second is possibly attempting to be neutral but perhaps those sympathising with the Police would call it loaded against them. But I could actually write a third story that would show the Police as positively evil or at least crafty and incompetent.

 

Let me take a stab at it…

 

On Republic Day the Delhi Police showed just how incompetent they were. Despite having warnings, from several farmer leaders, about a group of farmers who talked about breaking barricades and going to the Red Fort, they did not strengthen the force around the Fort nor revoke permission for the Farmers Tractor March. In fact, they allowed the troublesome group to lead the march. This along with pictures that show policemen sitting on chairs and silently watching while protestors swarmed into the Red Fort makes one wonder if indeed they were not incompetent but crafty, and planned on allowing this incident to take place. This then would give them a good reason to clamp down hard on the peaceful farmers whom they and the government have not been able to dislodge, or demonize despite propaganda to do so. Questions also arise on how 200 goons entered the Farmer site at Singhu while Police were controlling all entries and exits from it? Surely 200 men could not have slipped through? Also, it is being alleged that the Police stood by doing nothing while these goons attacked farmers. Now they have shut the Farmers into an open-aired prison without water and electricity. I don't need to remind readers that there are women and children present at these sites, and all of them have been living there peacefully for 70 days. The Police have also charged many peaceful farmer leaders with sedition. This modus operandi is how the Delhi Police, under the guidance of the Home Minister, has handled previous situations. Their SOP many would say. 

 

Hmmm…

 

The retreat was good for me, but I felt compelled to explore this today rather than write more about it.