Here, cooking and serving food is both an act of protest and also a reminder towards, what the protests are trying to protect, namely food security and its production in India.Īs an old man asked me to sit with him while he stirred a huge pot of rice, sugar, and milk to make kheer (sweet pudding), I understood another idea of speed emerging on the highway, based in the experience of gravity. The protest site unfolds as a ten-kilometer-long langar, or a type of community kitchen central to Sikh belief. How do you slow down a highway? With work, labor, protest, and with the slow cooking of food. I have walked the course of the protest a few times, and have come to understand another type of speed, and time. Today at the borders of Delhi is a protest site of historically unprecedented proportions in post-independence India, contesting the government's laws. The farmers’ protests in Delhi today can remind one of what is known as the Salt March, when on MaMahatma Gandhi walked 390 kilometers from the Sabarmati Ashram to Dandi to produce salt from sea water in a non-violent act of civil disobedience to protest the British government’s salt monopoly in India. After protesting locally for a few months, farmers from the agrarian state of Punjab marched towards Delhi (the national capital) as a form of protest. The protests arose in response to three bills introduced by the current government that ease restrictions for private players to function in the country’s agrarian markets. Earlier in the year, I encountered another speed on this same highway, provided by the Farmers’ protests that started here in November 2020. I have travelled this highway for a few years now on a near daily basis, to my university in an industrial satellite town of Delhi.

Velocity has that capacity, to make us dwell only in speed and our destination. Embedded as only speed or velocity between cities, the highway beckons a dromosphere of the landscape. The speed of the highway is such that it passes as a blur of non-destinations. Cutting through flashes of fields, small roadside villages, food stalls, shops, and strangely grotesque marriage halls, one does not dwell in the highway. On a normal day, the Grand Trunk (Karnal) road is a highway running northwards from Delhi.

Original monopoly board 1930