ON FORM AND CONCEPT…
Yesterday we initiated a small discussion on Form and Concept. It all began with a reply to an email that exhorted the good folks at Trina (yes, us) to dress in white to protest war. White, it was reasoned, stood for peace and dressing in white therefore was tantamount to protesting war.

A couple of us (Sanjeev and me) questioned the adoption of the same Form for multiple Concepts. (Dress up in blue for Cricket, dress up in white to protest war...Are we adopting the same response to both these issues?)

Bhavani (Naik) contributed to our questioning by stating “the Form is only a reflection/expression of the true intentions which is the Concept... Compare it to praying and you would realize that the ‘Idol’ (Form) you pray to is not as relevant as the real devotion (Concept) you carry with it. So adopting the same response to multiple issues would not be all that irrelevant.”

CONFUSION…
(I am confused about the Form-Intention-Concept axis, so I’ll respond to that later…)

Instead, let me take a step back and explain the rationale for questioning the adoption of "dressing in white" as a means of protest.

ON FRIDAY DRESSING…
Every Friday (rather, on most Fridays) we have a Theme Dressing event in our office. I do not know if my opinion will be contested if I state that the Theme Dressing event has traditionally been a "casual and fun affair". So much so, that we await with anticipation Monika's next piece of creative ingenuity (Here I should confess that rarely has she let us down!)

WHAT IS PEACE?
Now back to our "Peace" issue (Imagine Peace becoming an "issue", where are we heading to?!)

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Fourth Edition) defines 'Peace' as the following:
·The absence of war or other hostilities.
·An agreement or a treaty to end hostilities.
·Freedom from quarrels and disagreement; harmonious relations
·Public security and order
·Inner contentment; serenity
·In a state of tranquillity; serene
·Free from strife

MY TAKE ON PEACE…
Now let me add another "experiential" angle to "Peace".

To me: Peace is the non-transgression of my routine.

Ponder a little bit on this and I am sure most of you might feel this way too.

(Non-transgression of routine - boy, does that sound intellectual!)

Actually, it’s much simpler.

My life is ordered as a routine. It is partly the “Wake up: 6:00 am”, “Perform Breathing Exercises: 6:45 am” kind of a routine, but at a larger level it is also that I have a daily, weekly and monthly routine that I do not like varying too much. For example, I’d want to go back home every night and find my apartment intact and un-ransacked. During weekends, I do not want the routine of reading the newspaper supplements shaken or stirred.

My routine is an amalgamation of my biological clock and the propensities I have built over 25 years of lifetime. I take comfort in that routine. And when that routine gets shaken or stirred beyond a level, it’s a bit difficult to digest – like the morning a few years back when I woke up to realize that the friend I had seen off the previous evening at the bus station had met with an accident and had had her right arm amputated.

YOU HAVE A “ROUTINE” TOO…
Think of what your “routine” is and very soon you will start seeing it - the levels of predictability you’d like to see in your life and the limit to which such routines can be disturbed. The day your “routine is transgressed beyond a tolerable limit” you’d lose your “peace.”

Peace in a sense is maintaining the “status quo” of (y)our existence.

WAR AND THE FRIDAY THEME DRESSING – THE MISFIT AS I SEE IT
Let me make the move from “Status Quo/Peace/Routine” to “Form and Concept”.

It is within the state of our (Trina’s) “routine” that we situate the “Friday Theme Dressing”. It’s a routine that is casual and fun.

War is neither casual nor fun (though it can be foisted on a nation casually and for funny reasons, but that’s another matter).

By bringing the issue of “war” into the ambit of “status quo/routine/peace” I believe that we are actually extending the “status quo” of our “peaceful existence” to an unjust war. We are accepting war to be a daily reality –a routine- and making peace with it. In effect, we are paling a serious war into an insignificance that is casual and fun.

Also, by applying the same Form (Last Week: Wear blue to support the men in blue, This Week: Wear white to protest war, Next Week: Wear some other color to celebrate/protest something else) to different Events/Concepts, we are reducing history to fleeting granular events – like most of the news channels do. (How many of us know that for a week now, the fiercest of fighting has been going on in Afghanistan to eliminate regrouping and dispersing Al Qaida elements? This operation has been dubbed Operation Anaconda. Many of us do not because Afghanistan is not newsworthy - now that the same B-52s that bombed Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom are pounding Baghdad (Operation Iraqi Freedom!)

The hottest current event is Iraq and we empathize with Iraq/Protest War/Hope for Peace (or all of the above) by dressing in white for a fleeting 8 hours. As we move on to celebrate/protest something else next week, what happens to Iraq?

IN SUPPORT OF FLEETING/GRANULAR EMPATHY…
Sunil has an interesting point. “Isn’t it a good thing that we are able to empathize with Iraq/Protest War/Hope for Peace at least at this level of granularity?” asks he. Surely, something is better than nothing. But my counter-point to him would be: Are we fully aware why we are embracing a fleeting/granular mode of empathy? (One might embrace a fleeting/granular mode of empathy because one might be impotent to do anything more.) If the answer is yes, I agree that this fleeting mode of empathy (the Friday Theme Dressing) is a correct Form of protest.

FLEETING MOMENTS AND WHAT IF…
What if MK Gandhi had for a fleeting 8 hours practiced sathyagraha and then forgotten all about it? What if Bismark had fought just one skirmish on the Austrian border and hung up his boots? What if Sachin Tendulkar had decided he was content with the 657 (more or less) run partnership he had with buddy Vinod Kambli while playing for the Sharadashram School? What if Navjot Siddhu had just one one-liner?

What if our lives take on the fleeting language and the grammar of the hypertext?

What if we let things move on so fast that we don’t create or bequeath any history to succeeding generations?

What if things got so fleeting that they don’t register in human consciousness?

What if…