From the archives - Time

Since I was recently harping about how it is time to get out of 'The Comfort Zone', this is an old post that I thought I would cross-post here.  There's no connection, but just felt how much we talk about having 'no time' to do anything.

TIME

Of the three types of input that every activity needs, material goods, skills, and time, I've come to feel that perhaps the least understood is time. In conventional economics, it is treated as a commodity to be bought and sold at will, and therefore needing no special consideration. Yet experience suggests that the economics of time is not quite so simple.

We need time to work, to eat, to sleep, and to accomplish all the daily chores of living. We also need time to know and understand our partner, our children, and our friends. Most of our relationships, in fact, require more time than we have, and it is difficult to avoid the feeling that we could never have enough. Nor is our list of demands on our time complete. We have ignored the time we need to be alone, a necessary but invariably short- changed period.

I know many people, myself included, who often feel "time poor" and who bemoan this limitation. Perhaps this attitude is a great mistake. Perhaps if we were to embrace the limitations of time, to celebrate them and explore their implications, we would find that they hold an essential key to the fundamental attitudes and experiences we will need in a humane sustainable culture.

The Guns of Gurgaon

I don't even want to utter a word...

A direct post from the indiatimes website.

Managing Gurgaon traffic at gun point

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Managing-Gurgaon-traffic-at-gun-point/articleshow/4866579.cms

7 Aug 2009, 1215 hrs IST, Ranjan Roy, TNN

GURGAON: I invariably approach the Delhi-Gurgaon toll gate on the expressway prepared for the worst. But I wasn't quite ready for what I saw on
Gun on Gurgaon streets "I wasn't quite ready for what I saw on Wednesday night," says Roy.

As I navigated my car towards one of the tag-users lane, trying to avoid trucks and cabs muscling in from all angles and squeeze through thin spaces between the multiple lines, I was cut off by a light commercial vehicle that barrelled down from the right.

The LCV nudged me out a bit but I stood my ground. It then moved forward and tried to growl its way in. I rolled down my window to give the driver a piece of my mind. The driver of the car in front of me, who was seated at the back while his owner drove, got off and tried to reason with the trucker to back off. But the truck driver
wasn't listening.

That's when I saw the artillery come out. A young man, wearing jeans and tee, leapt out of the driver's seat and rushed to the truck. He whipped out a revolver and held it against the LCV driver's neck and asked him for his licence. The ashen-faced driver, his bravado now drained by the black barrel pressed to his adam's apple, meekly complied.

I almost cheered! If this wasn't a dangerous act of vigilantism, the young man could deserve a medal for bringing some order to the toll gate chaos. With traffic billowing around the chicken necks that the tag lanes have turned into, I regularly see tempers fray and people routinely roll down their windows and curse and even get off and thump bonnets of cars that try to nose in from the sides into the lanes. But guns being pulled out was a new one.

As I watched the young man hold the LCV driver at bay, some other cars and cabs tried to sneak into the lane and blocked his car again. Having crossed the LCV, the gunman now strode ahead to take on smaller prey. Brandishing what looked like a heavy-calibre revolver, the kind cops are armed with, the man yanked out the ignition key from one car and threatened a few others that were seeking to muscle in.

``Goli marega kya?'' shouted a cabbie. The young man hissed something - possibly, ``Don't tempt your luck.'' A middle age man had come out of his car to say something to the young man. His family was screaming inside, trying to tell him not to provoke the man with a gun.

By this time his car had crawled to the barrier. The young man tucked in his revolver back into his jeans and drove off, fading into the traffic.

The Comfort Zone

Sitting in one of the plush malls in Gurgaon, I was having a discussion with my wife about life in general. It is then that it became increasingly clear to me that I had become like the others...something that I had promised to myself years ago that I would not become.

The Comfort Zone as I refer to it, is the typical situation in which a working individual finds himself in. Resigned to the fact that the rest of his life is going to shuttle between his workplace and his home. The same dreary routine of waking up in the morning, rushing to work, rushing back, having dinner, and falling asleep for the major portion of his life. It's getting into this comfort zone that I have always been wary of and now I feel that I am getting into this position as each day passes.

I asked myself what is it that I have to look forward to in the next few years? The answer was not very difficult to come up with if I were to look at things from a normal human's standpoint: I now have a home loan, the liability of which forces me to work days on end, tirelessly. I will soon have commitments towards my family, which again I have to work the same way years on end, tirelessly. Life becomes similar to a million other lives in the past and possibly a billion other lives in the future.

Is this what I thought life would be? Away from friends, family, loved ones? Not being able to find joy in the smallest of things? Am I in a place where I don't want to be only because of money? Doesn't that make the meaning of life so trivial?

Well it's true that the power to change one's life lies in one's own hands and my life is not an exception to that rule. However, the willingness to do that rests on more than just one's whims and fancies. There's an inherent amount of risk that one has to take and each person's situation to take on that risk varies. My ability to take on that risk, for the sake of my family, is extremely limited.

My wife asked me, "What do you want to do, what do you want to be"? My answer, which I felt was too dreamy and non-consequential was "I want to be famous. I want to be different. I don't want to be in a situation where I get uncomfortably comfortable with life the way it is right now. I want to do something that I enjoy, that I find pleasure in. If asked what do I see myself doing 3 years from today, I can only say that I will be sitting behind some desk doing pretty much the same stuff that I am doing now. Sure, there will be salary hikes and I will still have my job till the age of 60 or thereabouts, which is precisely what I mean by being uncomfortably comfortable."

Of course, there might be unforseen situations that might make things uncomfortable, but my classification of feeling comfortable is different. It doesn't revolve around my being handicapped and unable to do anything as being classified as uncomfortable, but moreso challenging myself to do new things, following a passion and living life on my terms.

It's time to move on. It's time to take matters into one's own hands. It's time.

Selfless promotion of the only group I belong to on Facebook!

Readers,

This post is nothing but a promotion of a group that I belong to on Facebook - "We Hate Gurgaon". If you know me, interact with me, follow me on Twitter, or even remotely know who I am, this group will come as no surprise to you. Gurgaon - a village of which the lesser said, the better. Am not going to go on a rant right here - for that, there's Twitter and of course this group.

I moved to this village in NCR (National Cattle Region) about 32 months ago and have hated it with a vengeance with each passing day. In fact, what this place has done has further led me to hate all of the North, including Delhi, Punjab, and whatever else is north of Kolkata.

This group was started by a friend of mine (Arjun Kolady) and myself. I hold the title of "Chief Subversion Officer". While my friend was lucky enough to move to Bangalore 12 months from moving to Gurgaon and starting this group, I have been rotting here since December, 2006 and judging by the way things are moving in my life, am stuck here for some more time, unless an act of God or a benevolent miracle rescues me from my grief.

If you have been to this place or if you have any intentions of visiting, please do go through the content listed on this group and you will definitely understand that the so-called "Millennium City" is nothing short of a shoddy, ill-planned, ill-constructed, zero-infrastructure, zero-transport, green-less wonder of the 21st century.

Come one, come all - to the group...not to Gurgaon.

~ Hef