Time

Morung Express Editorial

Even for a small State like Nagaland with few congested urban locations, a lot of man hours are lost every day due to traffic jams. It is estimated that India loses Rs. 60,000 crores every year due to traffic congestion. A government servant gets his full pay even if the staff bus reaches the office late by an hour every day. But the combined work hours that are lost due to traffic jam is costing the State economy very dearly. The irony is that traffic jams are often caused by silly reasons. It could be a wrongly parked car, a driver on the phone, or a mini bus stopping at all the wrong places picking and dropping passengers. It is said that at the start of any traffic jam is an idiot. Building good roads and parking spaces, managing traffic, etc will save a lot of precious time every day.

A lot of precious hours are also wasted through use of electronic gadgets. These devices which ought to save us time are robbing us of time. Instead of going to a library, we can sit at home and check scholarly materials from online libraries through laptops. Instead of standing on a long queue, we can transfer money or buy train tickets from our smart phones. But has technology given us extra time that we never had? Things get done quicker but we seem to have not gained any additional time. One reason is that we have misused technology and have become enslaved to it. If traffic jam is causing loss of man hours to business and office people, thousands of students’ man hours are lost every day to Facebook, WhatsApp or gaming. Smart phones have made us staring at their screens more than they enabling us to do other things.

Another area where we waste too much time is on programs. We have too many programs and functions that it is not possible to attend all of them. This may not be relevant to the recluse, those who are not outgoing. But for those who are active in church and society, it can be a nightmare. And we do not know how to make small programs. We have created our own formalities and have made them demanding so that days of preparations go in for an hour’s program. Time management is also an issue that we cannot start and finish on schedule. I attended a jubilee program which went for four hours, and I have just come from a mothers’ day church service which ran for three hours. 

We have programmed our lives in all these ways so that we simply have no time. It is of our own making. The same 24 hours day which was enjoyed by our ancestors is available for us. But the same clock seems to tick faster than 20 years ago. All the time saving devices have not bought us any extra time but have instead made us realize more of its shortness. Since this is what we have made for ourselves, the unmaking is also up to us. When we ask for someone’s time, we say, ‘can you make the time?’ In a way, time is something that we can ‘make’. We can make time for what/who is worth giving our time. At a deeper level, what we might miss when we grow too old is that we didn’t have enough time for conversation, nurturing friendship, meditation and reflection, or doing what we love. But while we have the time, we can choose to make time for them.