Suffocations and Breathing: Flash Mobs as a Decolonial Exercise of Wellbeing in India

Sayan Dey

Since childhood, we have been taught that breathing is a biological process that regulates the habitual existence of living organisms on Earth. However, the evolution of diverse philosophies of existence across different segments of time and space has positioned the biological process of breathing within a wider, diverse, and phenomenological matrix, where breathing is not only a physical process but also a ‘beyond-the-human’ ideological process. This argument gains further clarity when the phenomenon of breathing is analyzed with respect to the work culture and the state of physiological well-being of workers in corporate institutions. If workers can fetch profit to the market, they are treated with dignity; and in case they fail to yield profit, they are immediately disposed of. Based on these arguments, this article unfolds the various visible and invisible ways in which the corporate institutions in India ‘suffocate’ the physical and psychological well-being of workers through its incarcerated principles of modernity/coloniality. Through the aspect of flash mob performances across corporate institutions in India, this article also makes an effort to generate creative and resistant modes of decolonial healing in everyday life.