Return to Normalcy

Hundreds of them, and thousands of their family members, had always looked at the factory as a promised bowl of rice. It was here that they worked, day and night, without caring for the long hands of the watch fixed in the tall tower, or for the light- dim or bright. They have been working in this factory for a time longer than the loss of collective childhood.

In the last 10-15 years, free markets have showered its riches on the factory. Its assets grown, profits multiplied. And these assets and profits were intertwined with the growing working hours. With each wave of amassing wealth, with each round of retiring or retrenched worker, came swelling fear of losing job, and breaking of the rice bowl. They worked even harder to please the master, to keep the conveyor belt moving, even faster. But with the increasing speed of the conveyor belt, the number of hands locked outside the gate was growing bigger, which further scared them, and they moved it even faster.

As the days grown longer, stretching from dawn to dusk, most of them started forgetting that their children were getting taller, and they needed new clothes. More money could bring it, but for the bare two hands it couldn't be. When there are millions of hands waiting outside, ready to take over at the slightest of discontent, you can not ask for new clothes for your children, now in their teenage.

But slaves of capital can not ask for money. First it had to be freedom, freedom from fear, the scariest of which is fear of losing job. So they instead demanded a regular job, which can not be terminated at the whims of the market. They were agitating peacefully, sitting on hunger-strike. What they got instead were bullets, what they lost were a few lives with whom they had learned to live, and now to fight. But there was a life which was also lost, but which weighed heavily on the system, which was worth many million times of other lives, if measured in rupees. It was that of the master. So the balancing wheel, alias, the repressive machinery was put into motion, rolling over the workers' resistance, crushing it, trying to get them back to the same old world, where fear looms large.

Later newspapers reported it as return to normalcy.