P. G. Bhaskar :
No!’ My school teacher would roar from a great height, even as I trembled in my little khakhi shorts and stared fearfully at her. ‘It is not ‘what’s the time on your watch’. It is ‘what’s the time by your watch’. Don’t ever forget!’
I have not forgotten, miss. But over the years, I have got confused about the concept of time itself. What exactly is this thing? How did it start? And where is it taking us?
The idea of ‘time’ has always been with us, much before we ever thought of an instrument to measure it with. Days and nights set patterns of everyday time. Within each day, pangs of hunger have always provided evidence of the passage of time. Over longer periods, the changing seasons – the pristine glory of spring, the chilly fingerprints of winter – added meaning and new dimensions to the concept of time. Of course, there have always been those great truths to contend with; of birth, life and death over a period of time. Over the years, we have learnt many things about time; that it waits for no man, that it is a great healer and that a stitch in time saves nine.
People respond to time in different ways. For my father, time is religion. He sleeps on time and is a strong proponent of timely meals. He walks daily at 5pm. And 6am necessarily has to translate into coffee and a newspaper. For him, time is not merely incidental, it is like a source of energy, a motivation, even inspiration to do things. All he needs to have a shower in the morning is for the time to turn eight. Likewise, he needs nothing more than the clock to strike one to be ready for lunch.
For my son and wife on the other hand, time is an irritant at best; at worst, a severe handicap. They do not like to stick to time, finding it a dead weight. Their bedtimes can vary by as much as three or four hours from one night to another. Sometimes, they treat night as day and vice versa. It almost seems to me that they are trying to put time in its place by not allowing a place for time.
Often, I’m appalled by my wife’s ‘understanding’ of time. Once, we were driving to Abu Dhabi to visit a friend. We were well into the city but still about half an hour from their house, when my wife phoned them. ‘We’re almost there’ she told them, ‘just two or three minutes away’. ‘We’re not!’ I exclaimed in protest. ‘We are some thirty minutes away.’ She scoffed and told our friends I didn’t know what I was talking about. We reached their place exactly thirty two minutes after our conversation. (And I swear I did not take a longer route just to prove a point). Upon reaching, I naturally expected my wife to admit her mistake, if not actually grovel. Instead, she looked at her watch and said, ‘Hmmm… thirty two minutes. You said thirty, I said three. We are both wrong.’
Time means different things to different people. It also means different things at different times to the same person. When teenagers are on facebook, time flies. When they are learning grammar for their second language at school, time crawls and often comes to a dreary halt. Sometimes my wife ‘nips’ across to a mall only to return several hours later, more to her own surprise than mine. Time can zip, play truant or simply stand still. Sometimes, we pass time, sometimes time passes us by. There are good times, bad times, ‘auspicious’ times and times that try men’s souls.
Earlier, time used to be compartmentalised. There was time for work and there was family time. Now, thanks to smartphones and Blackberry, outsourcing, globe-trotting all the rest of it, it appears that time itself has got confused. There is always light at night and it’s often hazy at noon. People sleep at odd hours. They watch world cup football late at night and have dinner in the wee hours of the morning. What on earth is happening, time seems to be asking, scratching its head in puzzlement.
And while on the subject of time, have you heard of the monk who wanted to travel to the future in a time-machine so that he could tell the generations to come the importance of living in the present?
(P. G. Bhaskar’s ‘So who says I’m middle-aged?’ a collection from some of his Khaleej Times articles.)
