It's a Question of Time

The concept of time never fails to baffle me. In fact, with each passing year I wonder who decided to divide this timeless world into understandable miniscule pieces. No mean task. But I can’t help questioning why one second stands for a particular piece of time, and why one minute is so and an hour so… I end up groping in the dark…

Thankfully, people have their own way of measuring time something on the lines of IST (Indian Standard Time) that we Indians love to joke about. Of the different standard time frames that I have seen or observed, I can distinctly classify a few: women have different ST for cooking, getting dressed, sulking, arriving at a particular place (they can customize even time to suit their purpose) marketing and sales folks never fail to extend a minute to an hour (they strongly believe that punctuality is the virtue of useless and lazy people who don’t mind arriving early and waiting endlessly for people to arrive); for kids/adolescents the study time is inversely proportional to play time or vice versa…I have purposely omitted the ST applicable to celebrities, VIPs and VVIPs because they belong to an alien world, at least where I am concerned.

After watching how commoners deal so well with time – quantifying it, cutting and adding to it as and when needed, I realized I had to do the same to stop boggling my mind with the big question – what is time and who decided how it should be measured?.

I have always associated time with what it has done to me. So, what I have are concepts of Time as the Healer, the Vanquisher, the Conqueror, the Devourer, the Irreverent, the Magnifier and all this adding up to Time, the Teacher. Clichéd concepts but they are the many truths of my life and put my mind to rest every night.

Time has served as a healer at every stage of my life though I realized this from hindsight. Be it when I was all of eight and grappling with the death of a very dear cousin. Or the time when I flunked, lost my first love, felt betrayed by friends, felt let down by family, and even now as I deal with some light and tight blows in my personal life… all along Time has been a cruel watcher counting my each fall with sadistic deliberation. But Time was just playing its role to the hilt… healing by being the tincture.

Time, the Vanquisher changed me from an introverted child who couldn’t and wouldn’t converse even with her siblings to an adolescent who could rattle off with family and friends or just stand up and speak her mind… it was unimaginable at a time but today nobody believes that I was a chronic introvert! That’s the power of time… it can defeat even deep-set beliefs. If this is the positive side, there have been times when I was walled up against Time and whatever I did the wall never gave in. I think these are universal experiences…

Well, Time as the conqueror too has been double-faced: smiling down on me sometimes or burning down on me. If it has conquered fears and bad times, it has also invaded serenity and peace time and again, and destroyed cozy comfort zones. It has conquered and altered the old selves unrecognizably in some cases leaving me confused… In this sense, I acknowledge its devouring side.

During desperate and helpless times, I have hated Time imagining him (ya wickedness has a gender) to be this mean guy who has powers, is well aware of it and loves to play vicious games just for thrills oblivious to the consequence it has on mere mortals. I have seen how glory, reputation and appeal have fallen hopelessly while he looks irreverently and full of himself… What pride!

Coming to think seriously, I think the ‘goodness’ of good times is measured largely in comparison to the ‘badness’ of the bad times. Ya, with its powers, Time forces us to kneel down and accept that to a large extent we are writers of our own destiny reminding us how good and bad sprout from our own deeds, which we may have chosen to forget. Time is a true teacher – teaching, rewarding, punishing, cajoling, encouraging, molding and leading us inch by inch towards a self-actualizing state.