The daily race against time

THE other day, I became an accidental eavesdropper, a silent witness to conversations that weren’t meant for me. But all those chats gave me a life lesson, a jolt that made me question... what are we doing to ourselves as humans?

As I dropped my son at the cricket club at 6:45 am, I heard his coach speaking on the phone, “Oh, you know how it has been lately with all the tournaments, even on weekends... Yaar, time hi nahin milta.” His voice was laced with a weariness that felt ancient.

I parked my car and went for a walk. This time, I decided to unplug — no headphones, no blaring music. I let in the real sounds of the world. As I marched, I kept passing people, each one a walking, talking story of our collective exhaustion. A middle-aged man, walking heavily, said on the phone: “It’s been hectic lately. I don’t know where all my time goes...” Two young mothers, who were accompanied by their dogs, lamented, “Oh, you know, there is no time for a holiday... you know how it is with two kids...”

A wave of melancholy washed over me on the drive back home. As I rolled down my car window at the fuel station, I heard an attendant tell her colleague ruefully, “Yaar, time nahin mila iss weekend bhi, mera woh peon ka test tha...”

The city was waking up to the same complaint. At my university, the guard at the gate checked my ID while telling his friend, “Yeh Saturday Sunday bhi duty mein nikal gaya, ghar ke kaam ke liye time hi nahin hai.” As I parked my car, I heard final-year students rushing past: “Bro, no time at all! Legal aid, seminars, internship...” Again, it was all about time.

As I switched on the lamp in the quiet of my office, I finally sat down. My phone buzzed with a backlog of messages. One of them had a picture of my dog, lying blissfully upside down, basking in the morning sun. A sharp, sweet ache swept through my heart. My mind instantly flew to that old song, “Dil dhoondta hai, phir wohi fursat ke raat din...” It was a feeling best described by Brooks Hatlen in the Hollywood movie The Shawshank Redemption. Upon release from prison, he writes a letter to his mates, stating that “the world went and got itself into a big damn hurry.”

We are all Brooks, suddenly finding ourselves in a world that has no pause button. The irony, of course, was that I had to brush this profound feeling aside because I was also short of time.