The lost magic of time

This essay is an attempt to establish ideas against the mainstream. Our notion of development, and our ideas of globalisation, emphasise speed, efficiency, productivity, the instantaneity of finance capital. While these are important I want to claim that ordinary people live in the more complex world where time speaks different languages. Each of these dialects is a different story.
Sociologists today dull the imagination and then titillate it with concepts like speed and acceleration. Even slowing down is reduced to a science when earlier you just slowed down naturally. Technology speeds up our senses but as a form of problem-solving it emphasises the quick, over the reflective. Our way of life has no sense of the varieties of time. One needs a place for boredom, nostalgia, heritage and the varieties of storytelling and silences it demands. We have to see time not as something to be filled up or planned but a ritual to be lived out.
We are becoming afraid of time. Our notions of mobility and success demand speed, a quickness of mind. Our poetry seeks nanoseconds, not the beauty of dream time.
Take childhood. It is dream time, the time for hanging around, lazing, waiting, a time for boredom and dreaming. The neighbourhood was a commons of time where you hung around. You clinged to varieties of time and they gave you a legacy of memory. Even clocks had an amiability or eccentricity about them. The morning alarm clock was still submissive as you smacked it for subordination at six o’ clock. Time did not have to be filled. You merely floated in it. I remember the first tyranny of childhood was the timetable. The school spelt doom to a child still lingering happily on the playground. I followed the clock like a fanatic waiting for 12.30 pm, a signal of freedom.
I am all for discipline but discipline needs a ritual and rhythm, not impositions.
What I miss today is the varieties of storytelling. Servants told stories, grandmothers told stories, fathers and sisters wove bits of magic and repetition added to the flavour. The beginning, “Once upon a time there was a…”, was an invitation to the magic of time. There is little time for storytelling anymore and by constructing time, we desiccated storytelling. I remember I would not eat till I got a story. As kids we demanded stories; stories and candies were stolen time, the time of life before time became a commodity.
Then we discovered the story book. It was a different content of time, with its magic archipelagos, its own Sargasso seas of time, dream time, historical time and the private time of receding into the pages of a book. The novel gave one the first time of privacy, of secrecy. One felt the need to be alone, reading one’s favourite books.
The time of books has almost disappeared. I asked my students how many books they had read recently. They claimed there was no time, except for an occasional Jeffrey Archer. They claimed they were punished if they read story books. Preparation for exams was supreme. And slowly official time of exams, projects and deadlines cannibalised a whole commons of time. In fact, I want to redefine the meaning of the word proletarian. Karl Marx defined a proletarian as a worker without his own means of production. Ananda Coomaraswamy, the art historian, defined proletarian as a man disembedded from his culture. Today, I think we proletarianise ourselves by alienating or uprooting ourselves from the varieties of time. Time was the first commons and it’s the varieties of time that allowed for the diversity of selves, for creativity. When we lose access to the intensity of a sensorium and to the diversities of time, we impoverish ourselves. Our language loses the critical metaphors, the rhythms that allow for nuance.
By destroying time we over-valorise the time of speed and anxiety. Anxiety politics comes from the impoverishment of time. It becomes more urgent when time is a measure rather than a duration, a subjective domain to be lived out.
But constricting time or over-valorising one aspect of it, we destroy ritual cycles and the anticipation they provide. By commoditising youth, we destroy old age. We construct it as a sickness, not as ripeness. We construct it as a form of obsolescence of amnesia rather than as a time for reflection, for the wisdom of storytelling.
The other day, while sitting in the office of a famous journal, I met a sprightly man of 82. He was all there, full of insights, stories, throwing value frames like frisbees, enlivening us with insights which had turned rusty in us. The gentleman, an old IAS officer, had just returned from the Kumbh mela and he spoke of it with excitement. He took time and pleasure sharing his experiences. Suddenly, one realised that time was a gift one shared and in sharing time, one shared one’s self. Old age suddenly became a beautiful moment and in our impoverished hurry we suddenly felt grateful to a visitor whose conversation was playful about time.
In fact, I was thinking of the power of nostalgia, the longing for a past which is difficult to reclaim. Yet one can capture snatches of it. I was reflecting where Bollywood would be without nostalgia. Film lyrics allow for nostalgia. In fact, it provides for both sentimentality and sanity. A taxi ride or a wait in a hair-cutting salon is not complete with a Mohammad Rafi, a Kishore Kumar or a Manna Dey. Nostalgia provides its own travelogues, its myth of return-walking through the cities of childhood recollecting bodies and smells. These memories are so wonderfully concrete. It is always that halwa shop on that particular street. Smell, taste, touch and memory create the richness of nostalgia.
I am not making a plea caught in the words of a song Carry me back to yesterday. What I am asking for is a sense of time beyond the industrial and the bureaucratic. I was thinking I love the university because it has seasons, vacations and yet even the university is losing its claim to time. All I am arguing is that without time in its varieties; one cannot taste, touch or talk of freedom. A claim to time goes beyond rights. Rights are scarce while time is essentially bountiful. I realise I need rights but real emancipation needs time, the richness of time and time to enjoy it.

The writer is a social science nomad