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Twenty minutes is all that it takes

  

Published in The Hindu Open Page

Twenty minutes is all that it takes

The tale of those held hostage by time

THOMAS PAUL

November 25, 2018 12:11 am | Updated 12:11 am IST



There are one or two of us, punctuality-fiends, who always check into the railway station an hour or earlier before our train departs. We are the only ones on the station platform for the next hour. Even the resident dogs on the platform look at us quizzically, but it does not matter — we don’t take chances. To catch a flight, for instance, we’d rather come to the airport a day earlier, but you can’t hang around the departure lounge that long without attracting the attention of the security guys. So we stick to arriving only half a day early. Call us old-fashioned; we are like that.

At the other extreme, there are die-hard late-comers who rush into the station, sliding in like a football-tackle just as the train is chugging out of the platform, grab the nearest door handle of a coach and scramble in, wild-eyed, slamming their luggage around the toilet area, and then try to locate which coach they are in. This is their standard drill. They achieve this by being already late when they leave home for the station.

And then they stop by for a ‘quick’ social visit on the way. It is never quick, though. The leave-taking drill is long-drawn. Just as they are leaving, someone from the host’s side pipes up with a daft remark, or a parting wisecrack, which the departing guests have to then respond to, and the witticisms fly back and forth and eat into the time that should have been spent streaking through the traffic, towards the railway station 30 miles away, and they have only 20 minutes in which to reach there in peak-hour traffic.

The visitors suddenly realise they are late, slap their foreheads, call over the waiting taxi, pile into it, and instruct the driver to do his Superman thing and get them there on time, while secretly praying for an unpunctual train. The driver swallows a curse and hurtles through the traffic in death-defying manoeuvres, and screeches into the station 10 minutes late but luckily making it for the dependable late-arriving train. This being India, after all.

Has it been a learning experience for them? No way. Will they start 20 minutes earlier next time? Sorry. It will be a re-run of the old story, for they are blessed with a short memory.

In a city like Bengaluru, the commute is a horror show. In a space of only 20 minutes the number of vehicles on the road expands geometrically and algebraically, squaring every ten seconds. Twenty minutes are all that separate hassle-free traffic and a choking gridlock, because everybody starts from home at the same time and hits the road junctions at the same time. All because they haven’t found a way to move out of the house 20 minutes earlier. And they suffer the coma-inducing bumper-to-bumper traffic all the way up to their offices.

You’d expect that all the office-going population that has done this routine a million times would work out a way to beat the traffic — like starting from home 20 minutes earlier and hitting the road when there is less traffic. But it doesn’t happen because it involves organising breakfast early, instead of staring at the kitchen slab at 8 a.m., bleary-eyed and clueless about what ingredients to slap together for a meal.

The obvious solution here is to get up early. That, in turn, means going to bed early the previous night, after planning the menu for the next day, and so on. Old-fashioned time-management and priority-setting are still the keys.

It would appear that very few in the IT workforce reads anything other than what appears on their mobile phone screen. They just don’t have the free 20 minutes to browse through anything like a book or a magazine; many of them have even stopped subscribing to newspapers. All the news they get is through hearsay and WhatsApp. And on a bet, many of them wouldn’t be able to name, say, India’s Vice President: they’ll have to Google it.

Time is their constraint and their hamster-wheel schedule keeps them perspiring to catch up on the 20 minutes of free time that is forever out of their reach, and they are held hostage by the hands of the clock.

sagitex@gmail.com

https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/twenty-minutes-is-all-that-it-takes/article25587091.ece

 

 

 

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