What I thought most interesting about this reading was the concept that the perception of time changes and adjusts based on a person’s situation and the dynamics of their immediate world. Taneja writes about Azad’s experience spending time with sparrows and how his relationship with them began to affect both his outward and internal perspective. His interactions with the birds led to a “transformation in Azad, a move from agitation and aggression to stillness and vulnerability” (238). Such confinement allowed him both the space and time to turn violence into understanding – “a gradual rescinding of earlier fears and prejudices” (238). Azad’s initial notions and preconceptions of the birds were appeased as he grew an inter-species understanding that he had previously unknown.
Taneja eventually relates this transformation / internal and external dynamic with the current pandemic. It seems that with the forced quarantine, time slowed down… when people are forced to slow down, they are better able to pay attention to both themselves and the world around them, finally enabling a desperately needed dialogue between humans and current social issues. This is important, but it also appears that the world only paid attention to issues like Black Lives Matters to the extend that it did because of the fact that everyone was forced to slow down. Taneja suggests that it is “because the altered experience of time as a shared global phenomenon has already brought about a
moral reckoning in human relations” that people decided this movement was worth their energy (239).
While the pandemic has allowed us to have time to reflect and understand the world outside of its external factors, our relationship with our own personal “sparrows” should ideally be in existence regardless of the pace of our surroundings. Thus, if our time and space must be altered in order for us to transition from “aggression to stillness,” what can we do to actively achieve stillness and a deeper dialogue with the world around us without this alteration? How will it improve society’s outlook on current social issues?