Tag: Time

  • Only time will tell…

    My reading list during the Sikkim trip consisted of “The Immortals of Meluha” and “Chasing the Monk’s shadow”, fiction and non fiction respectively. Sometime during the trip, I completed the former, the latter was completed long after the trip.

    The first book is a work of fiction that treats Shiva, the Hindu god, as a real person and tries to look at mythology through a historical perspective. The second is a journal of a person who retraces (almost) the epic journey of Xuanzang (the latest spelling of the person we learned about as Hiuen Tsang in school). One myth, one history. One is a possibility, the other ‘factual’.

    The first, about a Tibetan tribal chieftain who is looked upon by a civilisation as the messiah promised in their legends. The second, a monk with an insatiable thirst for India.  In this age of rapid advances in communication, it was quite an experience to be transported to a time when people got news years or even decades after it happened. A monk who starts a journey based on a certain information, only to realise that while he was traveling towards his destination, things had changed – kings deposed, lifestyles changed, faith forgotten….

    The passage of time gives us a bird’s eye view of what happened then, allowing us to dwell on the possibilities of how/if Gods were created, to interpret snippets of information gleaned from remnants of a life, what it must’ve been like. From our vantage point, we see patterns, lifelines almost crossing each other, tantalisingly close, with the possibility of drastically changing the flow of events that transpired later. All this, after patiently sifting through the layers that have been added over the years.

    I wonder if, thanks to the way we consume and share information, later archaeologists will have a reverse problem, of having to go through mounds of information- multiple perspectives to separate facts from opinions. Or maybe, it has always been like that, and the sands of time have a way of burying it randomly. It is quite humbling to think of the possibility of Iceland’s volcano being a footnote in history, because it so happened that what survived was a casual, unaffected post which treated it as a minor news, as opposed to the anguished post of someone whose plans went awry, all thanks to it.

    Another reminder that history and beyond is just a perspective we get from what survived.

    until next time, time consumes too 🙂

  • Process pool..

    “You’re such a hypocrite”, said D, as i drummed on the laptop impatiently willing the folder to open faster. Not getting the usual retort from me, she continued, “On one hand, you want to slow down life, and on the other hand, you want things to move real time fast” A valid point, but rather than hypocrisy, I’d prefer calling it a paradox. After all, who likes to be labeled a hypocrite? 😀  I wondered whether it is possible for the two to co-exist.

    There’s another tangential constant running debate in the household. It is again related to time and time saving. It is also related to the one above because it is to do with processes. The impatience above is because I know the comp can do it faster, having seen it done before. So if it is a process, i believe it should run that way and that fast (if not faster) always. Yes, I realise that’s a simplistic way of looking at it, and there are variables involved, but yet.

    Now this is something I carry outside the comp too. And so it is that when D is doing a chore, I immediately strive to enlighten her on the exact process to be followed for maximum efficiency. My logic is that if I have walked a certain path, and learned from it, I should bring her up to speed, so that she can build on it, rather than start from Step 1. D hates it, especially when I can remark that as a software professional, i can understand why she should absolutely abhor processes. Cheap thrill, you guessed! Meanwhile, it doesn’t help that sometimes D discovers more efficient means of doing the chores. I shall, of course, have my revenge soon, when I become a home maker and master that ancient mysterious art, that in spite of several examples to the contrary is still considered a playground dominated by women – cooking. 🙂

    And its not just D, I inflict this behaviour on poor unsuspecting folk who appear on my chat window and want to discuss things I would be interested in. Thanks to the blogs, it sometimes turns out to be something I have written about, and so I immediately share a link. Its a way of sharing my perspectives before we discuss the matter. I look forward to a time when i can do it in real conversations too. A ‘Matrix’ like USB port in your head, so that i can feed in the knowledge, and you can say ‘I know Jujitsu’ and factor in my arguments when we discuss. I believe this will save us both time. But of course, I’ve been warned by quite a few people that its positively rude, so these days I politely manage to repeat what I have written earlier.

    But now comes the clincher, I sometimes have a problem when someone does this to me. I irritably say “Let me do it myself/my way” and also add for good measure, “Don’t you have any respect for my subjective experience?”

    No, its not erm, hypocrisy, I still think its a paradox, or perhaps two ends of a spectrum. On one hand, processes  help crunch time and on the other, the subjective experience is important, and perhaps might help discover better ways. The choice, I guess, depends on the situation, our interest, and our intent. Or does it run deeper and tell us how we want our life to be? As Morpheus said in a different context “..there’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path”

    until next time, don’t respond with links in comments!! :p

  • Game Theory

    There’s this favourite t-shirt of mine – “If you’re interested in time travel, meet me last thursday”. I’ve always been interested in dimensions, thanks to science fiction and Skeletor/Sorceress in the He-Man series opening portals in other dimensions outside the physical constraints of Eternia. That perhaps explains the recurrence of alternate realities  and parallel universes in the blog.

    S and I had this interesting discussion recently on dimensions. No, don’t run away, it wasn’t really a scientific discussion.  I definitely am not qualified for one anyway, though at a concept level, I think it did get close to M-theory. (no relation to this blog 🙂 )  It was based on an abstract thought that on one hand, time is getting crunched and so is space, so where is all the crunched ‘stuff’ going. My point of view was that, time was expanding not crunching, since technology has made it easier for me to do things in shorter time, so it would perhaps balance the space crunch. No, conference calls don’t count, that works the other way. Space is no longer crunched, because calls are taken on the mobile, so conference halls are not required, and sigh, the calls last forever. 😐

    The thought I had though, was that the relationship (space-time) was being defined in/by the reality around us. What if there were other dimensions involved which were affecting this relationship? Do they exist? Will we unlock them? Will they be the answers to the occurrences that we cannot explain within our current dimensional knowledge? Funnily, these questions pop up whenever I play with the shiny new toy called Foursquare, and see people unlocking badges.

    At a basic level, badges get unlocked after specific user experiences – some repetitions, some new ones. I always equate them to new dimensions we observe in our personality after different experiences. That’s a kind of unlocking too, no? All of that brings me to another unanswered question. Is what we call death is actually the ‘experience’ we need to have to unlock another dimension? Or maybe we’ll need the other dimensions only after the death experience? Just like a regular multi level game. 🙂

    until next time, death is a great leveler? 🙂

    PS. What if the experience we understand as ‘death’ is ‘living’ in another dimension? I wonder then if cremation hurts, but our expressions in the other dimension cannot be heard here. Brr..

  • Waking Life?

    (not really to do with that excellent film)

    All good things have a season finale, and when it happens to be the last season, the event becomes all the more poignant. Boston Legal has been my favourite show for a while now, and I am a huge fan of Alan Shore‘s sense of fairness. And while the description is tossed around a lot, there really can only be one Denny Crane. True, the last season was lesser than a shadow of the earlier ones, however it still didn’t take away much from the series. But yes, case closed.

    Which brings me to what I shall now be doing on weekdays 10 PM.Yes, I could read more or browse more, but when one has been following a show for quite a while, one does feel a sense of emptiness. It led me to think about how a life is spent nowadays. Sometime back I had wondered whether everyone’s life would be ‘interesting’ if it were to be fitted into a 2.5- 3 hour movie. Interesting relative to the daily routine that a typical life follows. Yes, the ‘different’ vacations included. And yes yes, there are those who lead an interesting life 24×365, ‘it depends’ blah blah, let’s forget all that, let’s say I’m talking about mine. Subjective, and at least a few others I know of.

    So, typically, there’s a routine, work, dinner, television/internet, weekends, shopping, cinema etc… How many of these are conscious choices and how many happen by default? Not the conscious choice of choosing say ‘Lost’ over ‘Ugly Betty’, but at least a couple of levels above that to say watching television vs going for a walk. Does the former happen by default,unless of course a health scare suddenly makes you stop, think, and take a re-look at perspectives, and therefore go for a walk?

    So far, I will have to admit that mine happens by default. And what typically happens is that when a template is broken, like in this case, there is a sense of ‘boredom’ till a replacement is found. On twitter, these days, I find a lot of versions of the “I’m bored” tweet in my stream. It made me wonder about how we really spend our time, about multitasking. Heh.  About incomplete experiences. As real time and technology advances are made at dizzying spaces, I think the templates are being formed faster and the dependence on them becoming stronger. Even at this stage, the differences between the tail and the dog are blurring. What really matters to me – the experience, the sharing of the experience, filling up waking hours, racing with time to complete x tasks in y time? What is the driver? Damn, its not even a who.

    So I stepped back and asked why it was so? Is it because I never thought about it that way? Is it because it is easier to make a template and follow? Oh yes, switching on the telly, or playing around on FB is definitely is easier than figuring out what one wants, how one wants to spend one’s time, and other such difficult questions. These require an effort,  not just in thought but in deed (eg.trying out an interest like the ‘learning how to play the guitar’ route) and answers to tougher questions in the background. Or then again, is it because of a fascination, a way of living vicariously through the real and fictional characters – on the net and television? Or to ensure that there is no time left for such thoughts, because I know they’re difficult ones? I think a bit of each, and anything else you’d like to add?

    And so, is it possible to make conscious choices every moment? Would that be the best way to fully live a life? I wonder what it would do to ‘expectations’ though – set me free or get amplified, for isn’t each expectation derived from a previous direct or indirect experience? But that can be dealt with later, for now, the idea, to use Mo’s words is to (edited) a wee bit “devour every little bit of whatever is on your platter”, and yes, I need to consciously decide what’s on the platter.

    until next time, crouching potato 🙂

  • Time Off

    In an earlier post – “Brood Mode“, I’d written about expectations, and how sometimes, they cannot be met. In the context of that post, Austere had commented thus “Is it the instant-ness demanded of the response that puts one’s brain to a side?” I messaged her on Twitter, that ‘the time construct’ was something I’d planned to write on next.

    Our response time has been shrinking on a continuous basis, twitter, FB etc are a manifestation of that – real time, but the changes have been happening much before that, probably with every advancement we made, not just in communication, but even things like transportation. So, the thought is, if we had more time on our hands, would we be behaving differently with people?

    When I was chatting with Meeta recently, we started discussing this, in the context of relationships with people. It started with me saying that the traffic during the daily commute to work, made me forget all the rules I make for myself, because with all the lane cutting and parking woes, its easily a scenario in which you’re either aggressive or you end up on the road, literally. So I wondered if it would be different if there were no time constraints.

    Despite only a superficial similarity, I was reminded of another construct – money. What started out as a tool of convenience has enslaved many and managed to dictate their actions. Much like the things we create to crunch time. The similarity ended there. Time is not money. Quite obviously, time exists with or without us, though the latter can force one to ask “Who does it exist for then? So let me put it this way, it is a construct that’s still not fully understood, whereas we made the money construct. But for the fun of it, imagine what you would’ve done if your life wasn’t dictated by time. What if you had all the time in the world. Would you be a different person? Would you behave differently with people?

    As it regularly happens these days with me- by sheer coincidence, the day after I had this discussion with Meeta, I came across this work from Hugh MacLeod, which puts it so well

    time

    until next time, timed out for a fortnight 🙂