Taming the time - part1

Muser felt annoyed by the attitude shown by some of his friends, especially Bystander's sons and Tom's daughters. Time and again he has been hearing their complaints about time, rather the lack of it! He was hard put to understand how this universal quantity could vary from person to person. Falling outside the realm of Einstein’s relativity, he himself had felt time running out when in joy or walking dead slow during periods of sadness.

This paradox has another parallel, for quite opposite reasons – when days run out on students feeling the tension, during preparation for exams, and days taking unduly long time in the case of young hearts looking forward to their wedding. But what reasons Bystander and Tom had?

Muser decided to dig to the bottom of the matter and see what came up? There was a personal angle too in this quest which made him redouble his efforts to find and bell the cat. The catalysts for this timely reaction had come from two of his friends and he, a writer with jumbo sized imaginative ego, became the reactant. In the recent past, the stagnating throughput from his desk started to diminish the returns on his efforts.

Frustrated, he became his own devil’s advocate but was dissatisfied with the received advises that lacked conviction. It only helped in doubling his annoyance at his close friends.

He set to work to make them to realise what a excuse they were making as a cover up. Armed with a calculator he figured out that there are 86400 seconds or 1440 minutes in a day. The mathematics was not reassuring and he decided to ‘spend the minutes’ as his friends would be doing in a day. This approach looked better, at least to his mind, and stared the process of checking out where every minute of the day was going. Striving to be a perfectionist, if a need arose to argue with someone, Muser meticulously timed their expenditure to find out why they are not free to spare him a little help.

The fact that his friends lived in different parts of the country did not deter him in carrying out this census but the task was time consuming. His inner mind comforted him by pointing out that he need not even step out of the continent for this work. Anyhow he wanted to enjoy their company and rile them a bit!

In all, Muser spent about three weeks for staying with his friends, on invitation of course, to complete his time-study and another three days to prepare a draft copy of his findings:

Muser was aware that certain activities in a person’s life are considered essential and demand a major chunk of time in a day. Work and travel in the city traffic having become an integral part of professional life, it accounted for ten hours or 600 minutes. To provide support for the day to day requirements of the family another four hours or 240 minutes are spent in shopping, socialising and other household works to be carried out. To keep up going through this grinding routine day after day, rest and recuperation in the form of sleep needs eight hours or 480 minutes. Here he paused to count the remaining time in a day which came to just 2 hours or 120 minutes.

Appreciating the value of these minutes, he went over his notes to pinpoint activities that are essential, productive and unproductive yet jostling for a pie from this remainder. He felt compelled, at this point of time, to empathise with finance ministers who split hairs and juggle the numbers to present annual budgets.

Under essential category he put an hour of T V time as this can turn productive for planning next day’s agenda or to relieve stresses brought from workplace. If reading and exercise could be dovetailed with the TV programmes, this one hour could be turned in to most productive phase of the day.  He did not want to get in to an argument on this as anyway the time is spent in front of the T V. Even under the guise of exchange of information unproductive complaints and gossips cannot be ruled out from taking its due share of 30 minutes in a day. Muser wondered ‘What could not be done in the remaining 30 minutes of time, every day and why these habitual multi-taskers could not take up my papers , at least on the sidelines?'

These most valuable minutes of the day can be spent to get in touch with relatives and friends. Pending correspondences can be completed. Personal hobbies and development activities can be pursued. The specialty about this golden 30 minutes is this: it can fit in to any of the time slot in a day! In the case of a studious person, the entire 30 minutes can be earmarked to complete a specific task by careful planning. He estimated that about 30 to 40 minutes are essential to read his article and send comments by e-mail, unless extensive interactions are required. So far they have not complained about lack of clarity in the subject matter or cogent presentation of thoughts.

Muser wanted to ask them, “When the two of you never fail to boast about your planning acumen, why not come together to share, review and send comments?  Do I have friends who cannot spare this little time every week to help reading a draft? Don’t they know that when somebody asking for a favour is actually showing you a favour? Don’t they know that to read someone’s draft is a privilege extended to a worthy person?”

All these homework did not help him to find an answer to his question “Why his friends kept on complaining about lack of time?” He decided to confront them with his compiled data and see how they would react to it. If serious objections were raised, he was prepared to carry out another elaborate time-study on them since he had been a little liberal on the first count!

The Soul search & Stray dogs - Bytes from Bystander

Soul search and the stalemate:

The essence or spirit of life is deemed to be the soul. The soul enters a human body at the time of birth and leaves at the appointed time. Who decides the time and whether there exists a possibility of getting an extension are in the realm of faith and religion. What happens to the departed soul and how the sequence of rebirth is determined, if the soul has eternal existence?

If the never ending cycle of re-births is accepted for the departed souls, then this question on the increase of human population needs a convincing answer on the paradox, how an increase can occur when the same numbers of souls take re-births? Should this figure not be a constant? The birth to death ratio and birth of multiple offspring does not help in explaining the increase in human beings.

Suppose, there is a law of conservation of souls at work to manage this figure and for this law to operate successfully, the total number of souls had been distributed among all the forms of lives in the universe, to start with.  And by up gradation, the souls from lower forms of lives join the human population. For this theory to work, it has to be conceded that all forms of lives have souls.

Even if this is acceptable, the numbers don’t add up as the count of species runs in to millions and each one with a population of millions. Species becoming extinct, falling prey in the food chain and natural deaths amongst them liberates millions of souls. Do all these get upgraded to the next form of life? In answering one paradox another one has surfaced to confound the calculations.

One way to reduce the rush of souls at the gate of human factory would be to introduce a wait-listed system for the departed souls to allow only those souls which had inhabited species with five senses to get promoted. At this threshold the number of competing souls drastically reduces but still the growth figures for the human population remain unexplained. Another interesting point that comes up now is the possibility of re-births even in the lower orders of living things.

Conception of a human embryo is beset with complications and unimaginable hurdles - millions of sperms manage to fertilise a few eggs. In the subsequent stages, still birth and child mortality influence the growth of population. It is a wonder how an upgraded soul or a departed soul from a human being manages to find the right host, truly winning against astronomical odds!

How and when the soul does enter a human body? Probably, with the first breath the newborn takes after coming out of the womb. What sort of a record the soul brought to the child at the time of its birth? How the DNA is able reads the encrypted instructions and act accordingly? How then the soul leaves the human body, may be, with the last breath exhaled at the time of death? What the soul carries away with it as record of its existence that just got extinguished? The spirits or souls may not suffer from language barrier but do they suffer continental divide is a pertinent question. When a soul is on the verge of rebirth, how these issues are sorted out. Another point is when a child is about to be born dead, how the waiting soul knows about it. Is there a ‘soul.net’ connection to advise suitable action?

Question after question or in the best case scenario an answer throws up at least one supplementary question or confusions. Bystander lost his nerve to go farther in to the realms the dead and their souls.

 "Switch Bharat" :



The more he thought about the more he liked the idea. For an idea to succeed it must have measurable potential and deployable resources to convert an opportunity in to an enterprise. On this count, he felt his idea had a great appeal. He never thought a news item, casually read, will leave such a hallmark impression in his mind and slowly gelled in to this idea.

Taking stock of his preferences, he came to the conclusion of being neither an animal lover nor a hater but opting to keep a safe distance from being bitten by any pet or stray dogs or wild animals, including the snake varieties. In his boyhood he had chased some dogs and cats after ascertaining that they had no intention of coming anywhere near the biting distance. The lucky escapes could have been because of he and the chased ones were confused about their ‘pet’ or ‘stray’ status!

News papers publish statistics, metropolitan city wise, the number of 2 wheeler, 4 wheeler, trucks and buses that add to the traffic jams and commuter woes. Not to leave the animal lovers or haters feeling bad, they also come up with reasonable estimates on the number of pet animals and stray animals, including the bovine variety. He wondered whether, in the case of animals, this compilation was carried out during a population census and the numbers periodically revised based on either GDP, WPI/CPI or by any other method best known to certain people in the know!

 For the present, he was willing to take the published data as such, on pet animals and stray dogs living in each of the metropolitan city. He did not fail to notice a commonality– all metropolitan cities had more strays than pet animals!

Another published data on the crime graph Vs strength of law enforcing force, hit-and-run Vs coverage of CCTV surveillance made him to, literally sit up and take notice. Thus he found the genesis for his, yet to be proposed, brilliant idea. He liked to tie all the loose ends before discussing his idea even to himself loudly. He decided to take a walk in the streets as it allowed him a chance to observe and think at the same time to analyse the idea.

He came upon a crowd of people near a mangled 2 wheeler and the rider injured but not seriously sitting at a distance. A stray dog was looking forlornly at his bike splitting its guts on the road. The question ‘in a hit-and–run case, what business that dog had there?’ remaining unanswered, he returned home. He had already decided how to go about finding takers for his idea – mobile surveillance. Who else other than the stray dogs could be streetwise?

He took up the technical challenges that are likely to derail his project and listed them for finding workable solutions. He envisaged creating a “waGSapp” to automatically upload videos from all the wired stray dogs spontaneously giving out geographical coordinates of the area under surveillance along with the tag number of the information generator. Public and law enforcing agencies will get an alert over cell phone, regarding the incoming visuals and audio from respective service providers. The hi-tech industries will support the effort as part of Social Responsibility.

The Central government wishing to reap the immense potential of this surveillance tool might join hands with a dedicated spectrum allocation and sops for the industries to encourage their participation, under “switch Bharat” scheme. The beleaguered state governments suffering acute manpower shortage in the police forces see an golden chance to gain  immensely – stray dogs are aplenty, don’t ask for food and shelter, offer voluntary service, rain or shine they are on duty and do not claim allowances, medical and retirement benefits. Yet the state governments may demand devolution of funds from the central government as it has been given the status of a scheme!

Some brilliant ‘think tank’ can come up with a suggestion that States can seek Central funds under deemed loss of ‘revenue’ as stray dogs do not apply for any license. Sit-ins and walk-outs are staged when the fight for funds echoes in the Parliament. For having claimed credit in the first place, the media and print houses make hay (yelp) and come up with passionate editorials and panel discussions sounding like music on the ears of the subject being discussed – stray dogs!

Not to miss a platinum opportunity to protect and get these animals a decent standing in the society, the Blue Cross will come forward to spread the technology to every nook and corner of developing and economically weaker countries in the world with the support of UN, as an alternative policing method.

Bystander is ready to discuss the idea loudly to anyone willing to hear, now! He will let the TV channels and print houses to continue to claim credit as it will keep the public interest alive and bring the political parties in the race, to earn smooth electoral mileage.

The misread signals from Tom's diary

When he leafed through the pages of a World War II novel , he came face to face, literally, with brave Generals conducting the war with the help of brilliant minds that generated secret codes for transmission and equally brilliant minds, bent upon unraveling those messages. Tom broke off at this point to check for more background information on how codes were generated in those days and the efforts of Alan Turing and team in breaking the complicated “enigma” code.

The word enigma strummed his memory chords about the confusing signals he had received and failed to read in his life. This made him to search for his chronicle where he had recorded such incidents. He started to read the written passages, in a whispering voice. He wanted to hear them like a personal audition. Tom was not worried about ‘any fly on the wall’ hearing his outpourings.

I was surprised when a long lost friend called on me after a spell of hibernation. The friend appeared a little worried but otherwise seemed to be in good health. After the pleasantries and a meal, both got talking about the bygone days. At this point my wife joined them and enquired about the well being of the friend’s family members though this little curtsy never occurred to me, till then.

The friend had come to seek a ‘bridge loan’ to steady the finances of the small enterprise he was managing. No sooner these words came out, my wife threw her peculiar slant look in my direction to freeze any action I was contemplating. Compelled to decline my friend’s request, I could only manage a half hearted participation in further conversations. Getting the message, the friend politely excused himself after thanking us for the hospitality. This incident rankled in me for some days.

Few months afterwards, my wife’s friend came over and the ladies got talking about common friends and relatives of each other. The long, animated talk must have tired them a bit and my wife, suddenly remembering my presence, emerged from the kitchen with a tray loaded with tea and snacks. She broke the news, in an undertone that her friend is planning to purchase an apartment and had asked for a loan of a few lakhs of rupees. She assured that the money will be returned in convenient installments. In a conciliatory tone she also added, “If we don’t help her whom else she will run to?” What she left unsaid was who decides the convenience of the repayment schedule and a valid reason why we alone are in a position to help her friend.

I stood flabbergasted at the alacrity with which our money was to be siphoned out from the bank. That too, on a no-interest basis! Fuming within myself I thought about the manner in which her financial signals alternated - in my friend’s case it was a hopeless proposition and for her friend it became an ironclad deal.How deftly she had used her veto power to silence my stillborn protests. Will she feel bad to know that my friend had succeeded in getting help to steady his enterprise? Will it ever occur to her that a gamble to ensure livelihood for about a dozen people would have been more satisfying than helping a personal friend to acquire a comfort?

Disturbed by these thoughts in trying to decipher her confusing signals, my train of thoughts took me on a backward journey to the time, and the pages in my diary, when we had growing kids to take care. Their small needs were always spelt out at the last possible moment with this irresistible offer - to draw cash if that would not be a bother to me! My attempts to instill a sense of pre-planning and budgeting discipline were always resisted and resented by them. They showed resistance to counter my often repeated fiscal lectures and resentment because I have been resisting their moves to open their own savings accounts.

Don’t mistake me for an autocrat; there was no sense in spreading the fixed monthly income into number of baskets. Like the proverb “flowing water will eventually erode even a granite stone” they wore down my resistance and managed my withdrawals with nimble fingers, till the completion of their school education. Not to delay it any further, I opened savings accounts for them at that time.

My thoughts dashed forward, in time, to find out what interesting entries I have made to remind me of what happened afterwards.

Years kept rolling by and now they have become busy professionals. The unpredictable traffic snarls   ate up a considerable part of their time and they always complained about lack of time on any given day. Having enjoyed a pickup and drop professional life, I pitied them for the troubles in managing travel on their own. The interesting entry I was looking for leapt at me, probably thinking I would give it a miss! It so happened once I had to exhaust my reserves in an emergency. Running short of ready cash, I swallowed my pride and put out my hands toward my children for their debit cards.  At least I wanted to avoid them the trouble of finding the time and an ATM.

My out stretched hands remained supporting a column of air standing over them. To give them a chance to think about the possibilities of pooling cash on hand, I remained silent for a while as the wall clock kept on ticking as if to give me company. After a reasonable time they blurted out in unison, “Can you wait till evening, we will see if we could draw the cash while coming home!”

This unexpected answer took me back to those times when they could just get hold of my card at will. The questions why they did not trust me, for even once, with their ATM cards and whether my wife, if present during this exchange, would have raised any objection with the children kept begging for answers. They never fail to frustrate and drive me up the hill of despair.

I wonder how Alan Tuner could break into the ‘enigma’ codes during World War II! Anyhow, WWII is history and I am now confused about these types of signals, emanating from my own clan. May be I should seriously follow in his footsteps to crack these signals. Till then, what can I do except savoring the mysteries?

He came back to the present with the thought maybe he was not good enough to decipher their puzzling thought process and finding ways to overcome their trust deficit! May be he had been over cautious about financial matters in the early stages of professional life. Had he been extravagant, where from money would have come for the present comfortable life?

Wearily Tom closed the pages of the novel and the memories of the past to look at the micro particles floating in the shaft of sunlight. After having patiently listened to Tom’s monologue and loud thinking, the fly on the wall made its exit.

Canny & Fanny

 

This part of the story had to remain a secret within us as our off-shore or on-shore skeleton arrangements to dislodge grandma’s pets failed to yield the desired result. The amount of care grandma showered on them truly irked us as we had to compete for her attention along with a kitten and a pup. Their initial tentative steps became a brisk military walk when our grandma was around. A sad comedown for us the pampered kids thus far. We enrolled like-minded playmates to set things right. Though none of them had experience in dealing with pet animals, they bravely volunteered.

In her absence, we tried to scare the daylight out off them by perching them on the rungs of a ladder or putting them inside a pit in the garden. They shivered, cried and pissed in unison to express their fear. We constantly kept reminding them that they should not think that grandma will be around always to protect them. We were pretty sure that by that time both would have started to regret their entry in to our house.

Somehow these refugees had sensed that more and more trouble will brew for them in the coming days. They started to strike a relationship with the other members of the family to widen their fall back net. Initially they had very little success but trying harder cost them nothing, as their very survival depended on that. Employing eye catching tricks, performed in tandem, they just wanted to paw their way in to anyone's heart. From then on it was only a matter of time to take a hold in the remaining persons’ hearts for upgrading their refugee status to resident pet status.

They started to follow anyone leaving the house to work in the fields. By design, they chose a different person everyday to get in to the good books of every one by rotation. The march itself was interesting to look at – the pup swaggering on a barrel like tummy and kitten tagging along with an upright tail. That became their signature walk, thereafter.

As all these were taking place, we the children hatched and executed plans to get the animals a persona non grata label and expel them, without any success. We decided to pack them in to a jute bag and leave them at a distance from our house. To confuse their senses, we took them through the same street again and again, crossed a stream flowing by a woody patch and finally dumped them in an empty compost pit. The operation was completed at noon and by evening we were sure that once and for all the pup and kitten will leave us in peace.

As the street lights were coming on, we heard a commotion at the door. Yelping and meowing, the refugees had somehow finding their way back to the house. Feeling sheepish, we buried our faces in to the pages of textbooks to pretend disinterest. This incidence only helped them to get a tether to firmly hold on. 

The next emergency meeting between us children hatched another plan to evict the animals from the house. We somehow managed to pack the animals into a wooden box and transported our burden a few miles away from our house. We let them loose among the trees of a forest and quietly ran away from the scene in different directions to confuse their sense of direction.

The next day at day break, we were jolted out of sleep by the familiar twin call signs - the bark and the meow. We wondered what would have gone wrong this time. The answer came loud and clear a little later. Villagers who were passing by on the road easily identified the stranded animals by the familiar swagger of the dog and the upright tail of the cat and brought them back.

The animal sense in them might have woken up after these threatening incidents. The cat and the dog then started a series of parleys to win us over. They dogged our footsteps wherever we went and watched with keen interest whatever we did. Running through sugarcane fields or chasing cattle grazing in the paddy fields or wading through a flowing stream of water or simply dunking in a pool of water – they did it all with equal enthusiasm.

 They show cased skill in playfully swiping at flies or trying to catch each others' tail or simply running short bursts round the boulder lying by the stream. Though it was irritating initially, our friends liked their presence as much as they did our company.

Slowly admiration gave way to affection replacing our dislike for the canine and the feline friends. We christened them simply Canny & Fanny. Extra feeds were managed for them and as if to please us, they wanted more and more of such kindness.  They easily doubled their growth in a matter of weeks.

The next thing that happened was unbelievable as far as Canny & Fanny could have imagined. We bought collars, tin bowls and mats; pleaded with grandma to arrange shelters for their comfortable stay. The mischievous smile on her face had us worried for a moment but turned in to joy as she showed us what we were asking for. She knew that her adopted animals have earned their resident status through hard work. Probably she would have understood our misadventures as simple juvenile pranks.

The pets did not like the arrangement of living in separate shelters. They decided to keep one as a guest house and we had no other go except allowing them to do so. In a remarkable way they had demonstrated how they would carry forward their friendship in to the future. On hindsight we feel it was our childishness that put through Canny & Fanny to needless hardships, though there was no sinister intention.