“Restrained, Detained, Contained!” I read aloud, admiring the newspaper headline.
“Rats?” asked my neighbour.
“Young protesters!”
“Oh,” he said. “For a moment I thought the municipal pest control department had finally achieved something.”
What magnificent rhyme! Somewhere in Delhi, I imagined an official wiping away a grateful tear. Finally, a newspaper understood governance. Put citizens into containers, screw down the lids, and announce that democracy was safely stored.
“Are the containers airtight?” asked my neighbour.
“Of course. We cannot allow dangerous things to escape.”
“Like violence?”
“Like questions.”
I pictured a meeting of the newly formed Ministry of Emotional Packaging.
“Sir, the youth are angry!”
“Have you detained them?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then why are they still angry?”
“Apparently, sir, their feelings refused to board the police bus.”
There lay the administrative difficulty. You can seize a placard. You can block a road. You can bundle a young person into a vehicle. But try handcuffing disappointment. Try ordering frustration to report to the police station every Monday.
“Your resentment is under arrest!”
“On what charge?”
“Failure to appreciate our excellent arrangements.”
We older people sometimes know how to swallow an insult. We have swallowed enough already. A promotion denied, a promise broken, a complaint ignored. Eventually, we learn to say, “Leave it. Why invite more trouble?”
The young have not yet completed that government approved course in resignation.
They still believe a question deserves an answer. Imagine the inconvenience! They think their future belongs to them. Such shocking indiscipline must certainly upset people who have already reserved it for their own children.
“Can we retrain them?” asked the official.
“Certainly, sir. First lesson: when we say employment, they must hear encouragement. When we say opportunity, they must hear patience. When we say democracy, they must clap.”
“And if they ask when?”
“Detain them again, sir.”
My neighbour pointed towards my pressure cooker.
“Why does that thing whistle?”
“To release pressure.”
“Very disrespectful. Have you considered containing it?”
I imagined a triumphant minister sitting on its lid while a friendly editor composed tomorrow’s headline: “Seated, Secured, Silenced!”
Meanwhile, dinner climbed the kitchen wall.
That is the trouble with pressure. It does not disappear because someone has issued a statement declaring it contained. It finds another opening. Today’s blocked protest can become tomorrow’s deeper distrust, another gathering, or a determination carried quietly into a polling booth.
“Heaven hath no fury like the youth scorned,” I murmured.
“Will they listen?” asked my neighbour.
“To the youth?”
“No. To the cooker.”
Perhaps someone in Delhi should buy one. It offers an elementary lesson in governing: the louder the whistle, the more urgently you should check what is happening inside.
But I fear the first order will be to arrest the whistle, the second to praise the lid, and the third to commission a headline.
Restrained. Detained. Unreined.
And the clever chap who composed the headline? Ah well I hope he isn’t near that pressure cooker when it explodes..!
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