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Hold it! We want to get off
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Rush hour in metros starts at the crack of dawn and lasts well into the weary night, concludes frazzled multi-tasker BAGESHREE S.
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To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist,
that is all.
Oscar Wilde
One day in the life of an average Bangalorean: wake up to the screeching mobile alarm at six, rustle up a quick breakfast even as you chop vegetables and mix chapati dough for dinner in the sleek-looking food processor, wake up the child to put her through the blur of bath-breakfast-dressing up even as the school van is honking at the gate, (men can fill in their bit here) shove some breakfast down your throat, bathe and rush out to get stuck in traffic for the next hour or so, reach office to stare, stare and stare at the computer for the next god-knows-how many hours, get out to get stuck in traffic again, pick up kid from mom, mom-in-law, creche, wherever, reach home with just enough time to cook dinner, eat staring at the cartoon channel (what else will the kid allow?) and then fall into bed.
Phew! Can life get more breathless than that?
Home sweet home?
Think home and we are thinking chores. Whoever came up with stuff like "Home Sweet Home" sure was a vagabond on a park bench. Now research is telling us what we knew all the time but just didn't have the time to formulate it into a theory. Says Roger Henderson, a British doctor who has done a survey on working couples: "We are living in a world where the pace of life gets faster and faster. Many of us seem to have forgotten that the home is not simply a place to rush around and do tasks in."
N.S. Chandrika, mother of three-year-old Ankita, should know. She works in a garment export unit 20 km from home and her day starts at the crack of dawn. "The worst part of morning is what I do to my daughter. Even before she is fully awake I rush her through a bath and breakfast and drop her off at the baby-care centre." This constant guilt trip, coupled with the sheer pressure of cramming 48 hours of work into a 24-hour-long day, is so draining that Chandrika and her husband rarely stop to think of themselves. "There was a time when we watched a film a week. Now, I can't even remember when I last went to a theatre with my husband!" Weekends are, of course, dedicated to finishing all the piled up work.
Vinay S.V. and his software engineer wife Nandini have a beautiful house with enviable space around off Kanakapura Road.
Only they have no time to spend there. He works in a pharmaceutical company which has advanced work by two hours to spare its employees the hassle of coping with peak hour traffic. This sure means starting the day early, but doesn't always mean leaving early. "You can't pack up by four because there is always something left to do!" This translates to staying out of home between 6.30 a.m. and 8.30 p.m. And by the time he gets back home (26 km from workplace) there's not enough light to see those flowers in the garden. "I do nothing more than basic chores at home," says Vijay. "I put a jhula in the house when I built it and imagined spending relaxed hours reading and listening to music on it. It adds to my stress to see unfolded clothes piling up on it now."
Says Dr. Henderson: "The home should also be a nest; a place to unwind and relax in. We can learn a lot from the way previous generations behaved — and particularly the way they used to make time to do things properly."
For those of us who would tell him that we can't afford to sit at home to hold hands and whisper sweet nothings into the partner's ears, the doc offers quick-fix solutions: ranging from "change out of work clothes once at home" and "develop a post-work routine" to "ignore the dust" to "avoid work pollution home time in the evening." You can get plenty more of such advice from all those lifestyle gurus you bump into at every street corner these days. If you are not keen on walking that far, just log into the Net and you will get more advice by the cartloads: from don't forget to make love on Sabbath day to water plants together with your family.
What any of them rarely talk about, however, is that the problem lies somewhere deeper. In the way our work culture has changed, quite dramatically and irreversible. There is so much work to do and so little time. And you better find ways packing it all in, if you don't want to be dubbed a "loser". So you compromise on that part of life which is not monitored by an invisible whip, and therefore, seems dispensable: such as going to a concert, reading that book you bought two months ago or just holding your partner's hand and watching the sunset. Or even step off the fast lane to ask yourself: what in tarnation am I doing with my life? Busy at office with that new project and busy at home picking up and cleaning up after the rest of the family members.
It's when you feel awfully guilty about all this that you start talking about "quality time". Make no mistake, the minute someone starts talking about "quality time", what they really mean is that they have "no time" to spend. Come to think of it, we hadn't invented this expression during those good ol' days when good ol' "previous generation" that Dr. Henderson celebrates started work at 10 in the morning and went home at 5 in the evening. Can't be a coincidence that it came into our vocabulary and lives exactly when anyone going home before sundown came to be treated as a fossil from those dark ages prior to the dawn of globalisation and the "any time is good time to slog" culture.
Lifestyle gurus will tell you to organise time better. You could argue back: where is the time to organise? But you may have no answer when a poet, who does not ask you measure life in coffee spoons, talks about it. Peter Davison says: "Time lies all around us, when beepers and emails and paper memoranda demand instant replies. I do not for a moment minimise the difficulties that the Information Age thrusts upon us: the requirement to hold oneself alert and available at all hours, the expectation of always being on stage. Yet the great writers we admire have somehow, whether they be Balzac or Proust, always beat their deadlines when the word called."
Don't know about Balzac and Proust. But most of us, deafened as we are by the din of routine, are likely to miss the word even if it's hollering.
On the run
"The great long-voiced promise that technology will free us for personal development, leisure, fun, etc., shortening our workweeks and making work itself so much easier, apparently, has come to land with a deafening thud," writes Ken Lizotte in the article No Time, No Poetry.
Much has been written about the angst of a life spent running, and therefore, never quite lived. This poem by Australian poet Thorold May, Today has lasted for 4 billion and 2 years, 6 hours, 12 minutes and 13.5 seconds (from the collection Time Passing), captures this anxiety in a deceptively casual tone:
Live fast they said, go wild,
It flies, it doesn't last.
Go chase your moment
Run your mile, strut your hour
Build your pile, and don't come home
Don't come home, don't come home
And this is the way the world
Of the world, world, world, world stopped.
Susan smiled and waved from the footpath.
She was walking and smiling;
I was driving and smiling.
We went, went each way
And all day we were smiling
About driving and walking.
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