An Arabic saying goes: Man fears time, time fears the Pyramids. I wish I could emulate Pyramids and fear time not. Time is cruel, time is violent and of course time waits for none. I read all the discourses of Stephen Hawking’s in hope he could provide some optimism to withstand the travails of time in near future. In spite of shredding my most elemental pragmatism, he just sounded good at the most to me. Taming time, if possible, gets difficult with time. Time is a great equalizer. But one with capital resources will still be able to exploit it the most, or have chance to do so at the least. Time lost is opportunities lost. Opportunities are trade-offs and optimization: making the best of the resources. ‘Best’ is debatable and non-uniform. Here you can decide. You can’t have best of both worlds. But once you’ve made your mark in one world, you strive for the other. Time is running fast for me as it is for everyone else. And it does mean not having the option of certain opportunities; or missed opportunities at least. I fail to realize or accept that one cannot cash in all the opportunities. Opportunity A availed is opportunity B missed. And opportunity B missed is sometimes opportunity A missed as well. (This I say from my experiences with B-Schools ;) )
I was eighteen and I thought I’d backpack to Ladakh. It has been five years since then, Ladakh is still uncharted. My wish to document architectural patterns across the country, given the sucker of buildings I am, has not gone beyond perusal plans and buying few books. And my quixotic overland trip from Delhi to Marrakech is on kibosh more for lack of capital than mind-wracking visa-complications. Writing a trilogy on a city I love is yet to take even a shape as well. So all whimsical fancies, I am still fancying. I sometimes envy Marco Polos and Ibn Batuttas, who could explore unknown lands on caprice and be famous and immortal for that as well.
Life is too short to fulfill all your dreams and too long for just dreaming. Here I fear the time. Blessed are those who find meaning in what they do and remain ignoramus to anything else. No enlightenment is better than half enlightenment.
I am twenty-three, a number I dreaded till yesterday (I now have a phobia for the number twenty-four). TRAI has regulated pesky calls and spam SMS-es. The country’s Silent-PM is First-birthday-boy for the day. Bhagat Singh will be remember for a day. Google is finally into its teens, celebrating thirteenth year of its launch (they are overdoing Doodles these days though they deserve one today). Yash Chopra will get more birthday texts than Dev Anand given the number of sycophants he has. Out of the above and others, I cannot imagine a life without Google. All thanks to Larry and Sergey. And I now need to brace myself to equate time and opportunities. Capitalism is a distraction. I hope I find it so too.
© Rakesh 2011
