DO YOU HAVE THE ‘TIME’?
Last night, as has been my wont the last few months, I opened my laptop, sensing an urge to write something to end the drought of the last three years since I completed and published my book ‘The Diary of Mrityunjay’. And as usual, I kept staring at the blank screen as blank as my mind was at the time. So I decided to listen to music. As providence would have it the first album that came to my mind was Pink Floyd’s ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’. I realized that it was the 50th Anniversary since it was released. They have been one of my favorite groups ever since I passed out of college and when I started working this was the first LP album that I acquired. Years or rather decades later I realized that it had become a collector’s item.
As I listened to the haunting music and the lyrics of their song ‘Time’ I was shaken out of a stupor that had gripped me the last few years. I am reproducing below two stanzas that started me off on this post (though I would love to have the entire lyrics of the song here for the benefit of my readers, this would suffice)-
Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun
Though I never did relish lying in the sun, the summers being hot in this part of the world and I never was an outdoor cat. But I did relish the rain, sitting by the window and watching the veil of water pouring outside, also I did not mind getting wet; rather I enjoyed it when there was a gentle drizzle caressing my face, like during certain evenings, when I was on my evening walk along the seashore. I was not young then, but one day I did realize that ten years had passed since those magic moments occurred. Since I was past the age of being in a race, it did not really bother me whether I had missed the starting gun. But looking back (when I was young and felt life was long), I realize that I had missed the starting gun through my procrastination. Three decades have passed by, and now I feel I have missed out on a lot of things, a lot of opportunities. Time does not wait, it flows and you cannot swim against the tide to return to where you left off. That brings me back to another song ‘Yesterday’ by The Beatles, another of my favorites-
All my troubles seemed so far away
Now it looks as though they're here to stay
Suddenly
I'm not half the man I used to be
There's a shadow hanging over me
Now it appears that Yesterday did come suddenly, so much so I never realized it had gone. So will it be true for today, tomorrow, and the day after -
Fifty years ago, I wrote my first few lines of poetry. It was listlessness then, and it is listlessness now. It was then an awakening, arising from observing all that was happening around me. Thrown out into uncharted waters from the relatively safe haven of an academic life, left to fend for myself and exposed to the realities of the big bad (good) world, choose what you will, but it was like waking up from a stupor. I have written this in detail in the Introduction to my first book, ‘I am just An Ordinary Man’. Suffice to say I wrote this four decades later in 2014-
Somewhere I hear a clock chime,
Marking the passage of fleeting time,
Somewhere I hear the motor’s whirr,
Slowly from my slumber I now stir.
Back in 1973, it was a wake-up call, an alarm set off, to remind me that I have a lot to express and say. I was young then and it took me 40 years to say it completely. Now I am 73 years old (funny how the figure 73 occurs in both). Now I am 5 books old (took me nine years to do that, in any case not forty years). Now it is not a crisis of conscience but an urgency. That is where the song by Pink Floyd struck a chord.
Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say
When I look back and read what I had written in my book ‘I am just An Ordinary Man’ in the chapter ‘Silence’, nearly ten years ago, it was prophetic - It’s been two years since I started traversing back on the road I had trodden. Now a certain lethargy has crept in and a reluctance to continue writing. It is nearly four decades (now of course it is five decades) since that day in February 1974 when I first felt the anxiety of existence and a fear of death. Now the rumblings have started once again. Only this time it was an evaluation of all the beliefs I had built around me in order to remain in a self-imposed exile.
Yes the days get shorter and time is elusive, it slips through your fingers like sand. But something keeps pushing me saying that the song isn't over and I do have something more to say (unlike the last line of the above stanza of Pink Floyd). Remember Robert Frost’s famous stanza from his poem ‘Sitting by Woods on a Snowy Evening’-
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Before I end this post I will return to the first few lines of Pink Floyd’s song-
Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way
This was exactly what has been happening to me. That is why this post, to break the stranglehold imposed by my own procrastination. I do not wish to miss the starting gun once again.
And the song continues.
