Retrieving slowness in the Age of Speed

I often marvel at The Lunchbox for the way the film captures time in ‘maximum city’ Mumbai. The story’s resonance, to me, lies in its tone and pacing. For those who know it, do reexamine the conversation the senior Saajan (Irrfan Khan) and junior Aslam (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) have inside the packed local train when folks are returning home after a long day at the office. The strange, unhurried nature of it, where seemingly small life secrets are shared, kinship forged between an imminent retiree and a new employee of the same workplace. Later, we only hear, but not see Ila (Nimrat Kaur)’s elderly neighbour – who lives upstairs from her flat – dole out what condiments Ila should slip in or avoid or balance to enhance the dish she’d send to Saajan in his daily lunch dabba.

As someone who grew up in Mumbai and left it long ago, I can still vouch for some of the everyday magic that the film bestows on the watcher. It presents Mumbai as a slow city, a city of silences for those seeking it. It departs from several cinematic tropes and cliches that popular culture normalises in any metro. Similarly, in another mainstream film, Taare Zameen Par, when (then child actor) Darsheel Safary’s character plays truant at school, the camera journeys along with him, catching the mess, the beauty, and the strangeness of his city. There’s a striking shot of a sweaty worker carrying his child on his shoulders, and the camera becomes the protagonist’s eyes, almost capturing everyday gestures of love. Elsewhere, through the form of the whodunnit, the Vidya Balan-starrer Kahaani becomes a paean for Kolkata’s moods, nights, and colours.

Several storytellers of any of the big cities of the world have made a case for slowness, absorption, deep meditative reflection, even while you wrestle unremitting chaos. They revel in revelations in gradualness, even if their tales are set in breakneck metropolises. Great art and artists teach one to pause, to step back, to reflect deeply, to doubt, and to question what we read or watch, to access our innermost thoughts and recesses. We are losing such intellectual-emotional values rapidly.

We’re living in a time of unqualified and uncritical pedestalisation of ideas, notions, and habits that emphasise short-term achievements, immediate outputs, and quick outcomes over quality and depth that require long-term engagement, perseverance, and some level of comfort with discomfort, abstraction, and complexity. Evidence for this is aplenty in almost every sphere of human activity. It’s sickening.

To me, the online social media reel, the ‘invest here and now and prosper in the short-to-medium term’ like schemes, that ahead-of-the curve 30-day degree in coding, or the 20-day Artificial Intelligence certificate suggesting a rosy future, are all discrete parts of a larger ongoing zeitgeist that pooh-poohs the long-term and glorifies the short one. They come at the cost of reading a high-quality, complex novel, play, epic poem, or yes, even deep-diving into the fundamentals of mathematics, sciences, or economics. The chase for the quick answer, the swift economic return, is premised on the fact that the individual need not put in that much effort, need not learn at a certain level of depth when there are machines and software to do that. Sure, these means are boons, but these cannot and must not come at the cost of individual values of learning, reflection, and absorption of high-quality knowledge across spheres.

These foes of slowness and purveyors of speed bestow us the impasse of the age: By waylaying the cultivation of critical thought and reflection-oriented responsiveness, the app-addled, AI-drugged mobile phone and social media of today, enable binarism in thought and action: If you are not with something, you must be against it. How can one not have an opinion on something? How can you say ‘I don’t know’ as a response to a question about common but complex phenomena anymore? Ironically, the age of apparent hyper-individualism is selling to us an AI- and tech-led homogeneity. Indeed, if one were an individualist today, to some degree, one would be even anti-tech. Slow down, please.

(The writer teaches at the School of Film, Media and Creative Arts, R V University, Bengaluru)

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)