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.

Calendars, in particular, held pride of place in most homes. In my childhood, we used to have a Dunlop (or Continental, not sure) Tyres calendar hung in our living room. I can still recall the calendar of a particular year that had images of F1 cars in various tracks across the globe. I also recall we had a calendar from Carborundum Universal which had various dance forms from India represented by illustrious danseuses. These gave the living room a sense of sophistication and was a page-turner for the guests who came. These weren’t picked for function alone—they also made an aspirational statement. 

But the ‘real’ calendar that served many purposes was the Mathrubhumi Malayalam calendar. It was/is a must in every Malayalee household. This one wasn’t for show. It was used. The squares were filled with information: tithis, muhurtams, eclipses, festival dates, moon phases, etc. It also doubled as a household planner—marked with notes about maid leave, milk delivery, or other reminders, scribbled with a pencil. It wasn’t uncommon to refer to the calendar as a source of truth—religious, practical, and domestic.

But over the years, this slow, physical experience of time has quietly disappeared. Calendars no longer occupy the walls of our homes. As technology and lifestyles evolved, the walls changed too. The Dunlop calendars gave way to photo frames or wall arts, or now-a-days to the more trendy…wall beadings.  Even the mandatory Mathrubhumi calendar is not spared. From a place most convenient, it is shunned out of sight - behind bedroom or kitchen doors or cupboards; and in some cases, like mine, completely out of homes.

The change is not just about where the calendar went—it’s about how our relationship with time has shifted. Earlier, time was visible and continuous. You could look at a wall calendar and see the full month at a glance. You knew what had passed, what was coming. There was a sense of space and rhythm.

Now, we experience time in fragments. It either lies in the bottom or top corners of our computers or in the idle screens of our mobiles. Our phones ping us with reminders. Calendars are synced, not seen. Events are hidden behind layers of swipes. We don’t see time anymore—we wait for it to tap us on the shoulder.

This shift has made us more efficient, no doubt. But it has also made us more reactive. We no longer live with time—we live around it, always responding, rarely anticipating.

The old calendar didn’t ask for attention. And perhaps that’s what made it special. It didn’t organise your time—it quietly reminded you that time was passing. Maybe, the disappearance of the wall calendar reflects a larger truth that in making time more manageable, we may have made it less meaningful. 

We now experience time as alerts, not atmosphere.

#life #observations #thingswedontnotice