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The time of our lives
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Remember the days when grandma could tell time by the position of the sun? Outdated. But to modern man, there is no longer a notion of self that escapes the measure of time
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Apart from Lord Shiva, who else has a third eye? Well, Senorita Second-to-Second does. Let's call her SSS. This third eye that she claims to have doesn't sit pretty at the middle of her forehead. Unlike the Lord, she hardly uses it to distinguish truth from illusion, for, she's convinced her roller-coaster world is the final truth. The eye exists somewhere at the back of her head, which can read the ticking of that tormentor timepiece, even without having to see it. You could blame it on the times; after all, she lives in the age of god men and their grand miracles. Before she achieved this kind of mastery, she would, with great devotion, look at the clock for a minimum of 240 times each day.
There were times when she kept looking at the timepiece frantically as she chopped those two onions, even as the oil in the pan was getting heated. But now, even before the mustard splutters, her onions are chopped fine and she knows it takes her exactly 70 seconds. Mind you, she said that without looking at that ticking monster and was right. SSS knows there's exactly 22 seconds for her to reach the corner to catch her office cab. Five seconds to brush her hair, three for gulping down orange juice, four to reheat last night's left over rotis and pack it into her lunch box, two to slip her feet into her sandals, and the remaining seven and a half (she's the demure kind and so feels a bit too shy to tell you what she did in that half a second!) to shut the door after her and dash off to the corner.
Chores galore
Recently, when SSS had a multitude of things piled up for the one solitary Sunday: clothes to be washed, cobwebs to be cleared, shopping to be done, the so many articles marked as Sunday reads, that book which was supposed to be returned in the first week of July lying there unread, and a zillion other little things, and the timepiece racing off like it was Schumacher's big brother, she decided to quickly check mail and clear spam. As her computer booted, she dashed off to the iron table, ironed a shirt, and as the modem tried to establish a connection, she scampered to the kitchen to turn off the cooker. Back to the computer, there was mail from dear cousin, inhabiting that part where the globe's best jugglers and multi-taskers live. Just as she fretted over her only Sunday flashing out, she read his snappy one-liner: "I hope you have the time to stop and smell the roses."
This time, the mind raced backwards to the early days of the labour movement when the weary women of Lawrence, Massachusetts, marching from their dark, satanic mills in 1912 had screamed: "We want bread and roses too." (John De Graaf, A letter to our European Friends). Right to time was their rallying cry. From endlessly long hours, they demanded an eight-hour work schedule. But now, a culture spanned by the IT and BPO industry, the entire day, nights as well, have been taken over by these time brokers of the new economy. They have rendered us minion slaves, with no time even to put up a decent fight against oppression.
There have been extensive studies on what multi-tasking has done to our lives. Habitual multitasking, they say, conditions the brain to an overexcited state, making it difficult to focus even when one wants to. It's ironical that the gadgets that claim to help better time management have further complicated our lives. And so in our desperate need to find meaning in our non-work time, we embrace a mass consumer culture. All the little time that is our own is spent on Happy Hours, eating outs, fitness, shopping at malls, on choosing and buying things, so, where is the time for the self?
In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung describes the predicament in which the human being is unable to establish a connection with his innermost self. He says in every individual, there is the existence of what he calls two personalities — one which relates to the outer world and the other which is the inner self. The conflict, however, he says has nothing to do with the split or dissociation in medical terms.
Vanamala Vishwanatha, translator and a great cook, has always been an object of adoration for the manner in which she packs so much into each day. Talking about her own frenetically paced life, she says: "I have always felt in conflict with time. My affliction of perfectionism is exacting on the self," she says.
Coming back to the third eye, the Lord had a choice and kept it shut for most time. But a mere mortal like SSS can't keep it closed, not even while she sleeps. Haven't there been times when she woke up in the middle of the night, when that word she had been toiling over occurred to her? Hernotion of the self includes much more than what she does for the family. So much so that her favourite Manna Dey song "Poocho na kaise... ik pal jaise ik jug beeta... " doesn't sound real anymore. Particularly when each second is compressed into nano-seconds, and her all-seeing third eye, just like the Lord's, has acquired the power to annihilate. In this case, her own self.
DEEPA GANESH
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