June 18, 2021, Commentary with a movie on TV

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June 18, 2021, Commentary with a movie on TV: Today is a new day of introspection. This is the first time that June 19th is being remembered. Officially. In fact, going forward it will be a national holiday. How we treat this day in the future will be a testament of who we are as people. It was a day that was unofficial so far. Now it has been made official. It is important to make things official. Maybe that makes it real and people would pay attention. We need more attention at times. This is true for many things. The more things seem to get out of whack, as it has for the several months, making things official sometimes offers a sense of stability. An official recognition, an official remembrance all seems to stabilize histories. The need for stability is essential for us. Be it the commemoration of a seminal moment in history or the declaration that we are getting over whatever is the current crisis. Because there is always a crisis. This is another reality that has become pandemic. It seems that too much of stability is also undesirable. Official declarations, specific decisions, all seem to offer a false sense of stability while we have learned to excel in chaos. It is like the EDF hospital in Jodhpur Park. The video showed people fishing on the ground floor as water and fish had come in and several kilos of fish just ended up on the ground floor of the hospital building. That actually makes sense. In no logical system this should make sense, but as I watched the video I realized that the laughter in the video is a reflection of the new reality – crisis and chaos. It is not a reality of the pandemic only, it was already there before the pandemic, the pandemic only normalized crisis. Nothing is official, but they are declared as so. The official holiday, the official announcement, the memorandums with multiple code letters and numbers all make if official but eventually meaningless. There is lockdown still on in but walking around Park Street would not make it apparent. Everything is normal but neighbors on Linbrook Drive are discussing the Delta variant. Many have argued that this is the post-modern condition – we know no stability. There is no meaning that is stable, there is no condition that is official. Everything is up for grabs – everything is provisional, the solutions do not come from the staid halls of the management schools of the World but from the process of “jugaad (jerry rig)” that remains in the people of Gobindapur as they keep out the flood as the rain pours down. This is the strange balancing act – how much stability and official declarations can we stomach when we know that chaos will ensue at any moment. You can never relax, you have to be thick as a brick since you say to yourself, “I'm a bad dream that I just had today.”

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