It was chilly and I was eager to get back to my family staying in a nearby guest house. I just passed by New Delhi railway station one midnight (would anyone call it pleasant midnight a la one fine morning, I wonder). What are Days and Nights worth talking about without mentioning the events associated? Back in 1947, at a midnight like now, news broke out about Independence to India. Nehru called it ‘tryst with destiny.’ What a difference it had brought to the individual psyches of huge populations being an odd hour. Yes, that midnight rang out the old bells ringing in free India.
Talking of time of the day, every night is the same to me, except when I have to go and receive relatives at railway stations the next morning. The associated anxiety makes me sit up tense in bed throughout the night whether or not the relative was too close. In the times of my graduation examinations, days used to stretch into nights. At least in the early months after marriage, nights tend to stretch into day any day.
Time freezes into a moment when we were together with certain persons as against separation from them drag it to eons. Einstein might have known it well for he came out with his theory of relativity. Maybe he fell in love with the lab of the world. I am flummoxed by metaphoric or euphoric expressions to wonder how work can be done in no time, in time, or otherwise.
I see one cliché on time: ‘time and tide wait for none’. True, tides are already coming onto the coasts what with the rise in sea levels, thanks to global pollution. So times would be when we are hardly left with enough land to stand on; environment summits unable to sum it well in time. In the past people used to rise with the sun and go back to sleep no sooner it became dark.
Gone are those days when biological clocks were in tune with the sun, and it is now IST that substitutes the sun in businesses and exchanges across the borders online. On the social side, my friend has three grown-up children living abroad. He has set up three clocks on his bedside that tell him the time in three places across the globe. He spends many a sleepless night what with his wards ringing in their time. I wonder if he talked at all with his sons and merely talked with them in sleep, his Alzheimer looking slightly advanced.
Time was, is and will be a variable and an abstract continuum. Yet it is painstakingly measured, rationed and best utilised. Olympians knew this well enough when they beat their rivals and their own records too. Even in the game of life, the concept of time is prominent in its import.
Having no time limits it is like playing a game that has only one side. There is no thrill in winning goals in the absence of a timeframe; it will not make the game worthwhile, be it a cell phone game worth the time.
Time will always be against us and mostly behind us leaving telltale marks. Sitting in front of my TV, I wait on for yet another year to pass by me this New Year eve.