Time, Once Upon a Time
There is one thing that is missing from the walls of my home for many years now. They used to be hung there , steady and visible—watching over time as it passed. I’m talking about — the calendar. You didn’t check a calendar. You glanced at it. As you walked into a room. As you stirred your morning tea. Time was not summoned; it was absorbed. Not just calendars. The rooms included the wall-clocks , the tabletop clocks, and the random wristwatches lying on top of the centre table (we called it teapoy) or on the dressing table. Yes, there was a time when time was all around us. Not hidden in apps or tucked inside phones, but present and visible—on walls, on wrists, in corners of the room. It was ambient. It was as if we were surrounded by physical manifestations of time. While the other devices are still kicking around struggling for relevance, it is the calendars that has disappeared from our homes. Together, they offered a rhythm to life. Time wasn’t just tracked. It was seen . C...