BHAY [FEAR]

When the first human must have felt a sudden rock weight in his stomach, in his belly? I know not fear but what I know is what happens with me when I am in fear. Is there a difference between fear and anxiety? Of course, there is and who better to know than me? Who read it before feeling it. 

Three years this building in front of me has been a source of anxiety and fear for me. Fear of failing in what I used to like the most. And anxiety of failing in a secret competition that is prevalent in this campus since the Indus valley civilization. Group meetings, individual meetings and the anxiety of not been able to do much within a week. The urge to prove one's worth in the neo-liberal economy is at its all-time high. Physics, I used to love it. So much so that a hard hit I felt when tauntingly my guide said to one of my colleagues that if you love physics, one should complete his PhD. Oh! yes, I used to love physics. I still do. That love might be philosophic and the fun to imagine has a Hugh role to play in it. I like to say this, I could have been a Physicist but now I am a communist and the same feeling is filled in both the aspirations. People might tell me it is so impractically stupid. A communist is altogether different from being a physicist. Yes, I agree, a communist is very much different from a neo-liberal research employee in a still government funded institution. A physicist, however, might be very similar to A communist. A love for reality and a love for imagination that might lead us to it. But, Utopia, as they call it, is something only sanctioned economically today to poets. And a poet I am still, but I refuse to believe that the age of dreamers in physics and dreamers in politics is over. Communists are dreamers in Politics. Physicists, and true ones, not these employees, are dreamers of the scientific world. The day I joined this institution, I felt as if I am already late in saving my career as a physicist, which I had not yet dreamt completely. A rush in the gut of everyone to publish, to know to write and to be productive.  

You can use your ultimate quip that is used against all rebels of the neo-liberal economy. Call me "Lazy", Call me an "unproductive idiot"! But the way I see it, where is this all leading. Isn't all this succumbed by the market at last. Teachers here cannot take doubts of students and silent their doubts because of the compulsion to complete the syllabus. Say, this is, ok? You need to climb up the ladder of this research infrastructure and be in good books of people here, say it is, ok? You need a certain behavioral norm following tendency and there is no place for outcasts unless you are a Deepak Dhar, say is it ok? People in science are mentally disturbed and are getting mentally disturbed of this mad race of productivity and we say, it is, ok? and unproductivity is a problem? This is the problem with meritocracy. They make merit so difficult. On one hand, tall claims to inclusivity and people like me who could be dreamers are forced to go out. Take a drop. People might say, it was your decision. Of course, it was my decision. But is a decision taken in vacuum, an often-taken assumption of physicists? Why the zeal and love to learn and the fun to imagine suddenly got changed into the fear to do and the anxiety to perform? Why everyone in this campus is a jealous and insecure bitch instead of fun loving and joyous dreamer of knowledge? You might say, "Par Sapne dekhne se ghar toh nhi chalta na?" And my question is un-rhetorically the same. "Kyun Nahi Chalta?" Why did we let market decide how our households will run? why did we leave it all, curiosity, discovery, inquisitiveness and inquiry to invisible hands of demand and supply? 

These questions made me a communist and for good I say. As Brecht says, "Communism is not madness", "It is the end to all madness!". I could not be a physicist and I believe for good. Cause I would have hated being a neo-liberal employee of a government institute who wants to save his job at any cost, cannot question establishment, cannot question authority. My guide once told me, "Our job is to not question, our job is to do our research." Isn't it ironic? Research is at least, in the beginning, asking the right questions. If we cannot raise questions to the premises, the symbolic order and the authority, how will be confidently raise questions against the hegemonic discourse of our fields. Cannot we see, the hegemony of one interpretation over the other in the quantum mechanics' discourse. Above that, a loud roaring of a consumerist physicist, Feynman, "Shut up and calculate!". All this pointing to one direction, save your asses and jobs and be always a slave saving your aspirations from the ever productive "the big other". 

Today, I have to go to the building again, but this time, to take my No-objection certificate. This will certify that the institute has no objections with me. But, what about the objections I have with the institute. Big institutes do not listen to the petty functionaries and petty proletariat voices like us. 

I just wish this task gets over and I run out for my life from this institute. I will return to my place. A place where 6-8 hours daily, there is no light. There are no waters on somedays. There are still divisions of bourgeois and proletariat. Bourgeois like us, who can afford an invertor, and proletariat like numerous fellow people of Patratu, who cannot afford it. A place which has no infrastructure and facilities as compared to this big corporation of an institute. Still, it is my home. The anxiety and the fear are only temporary. I need an NOC; I need to send a courier and I finally need to handover the hostel keys to the Hostel manager. 

People who still think somewhere I was lacking and that is why I could not become what I wanted to become, I will again ask you this question after 20 years. The institutionalized madness will end one day, and people will realize, that people who opted failure in a choice between success and failure, succeeded. 

I just hope I reach home safely and begin my new journey and join the state machinery and work as a real employee of the state. People who work in educational institutions should not behave like servants of authority. I even claim that people who are civil servants should not become servants of the political executive. Remain faithful to the constitutional order. To the system of bureaucratic socialism, a socialism, which delivers. Leave, I think it is worthless to waste energy on gone things. 

The fear is a little less now. I hope I could take my NOC easily. Without any Hussle Bussle. Without further attacks on my insecurities. Without further announcing my failure as a wannabe physicist. 

I rest, But my mind cannot. But, still difficult times, these are. But there will be better days. Days where I will change things for the better.