Busy people who come alive only against a deadline say that they run against the clock when they are actually running along with it. Time is a concept too vast for us to know whether it runs, gallops, lumbers or trots. It is the clock that runs and tells us to do so, because it reduces time to its own narrow categories.

If you really run against the clock, and keep running for a while, you might reach the clock-less pre-industrial age when there was no need to synchronise human labour across countries and climates. The Industrial age invented the clock to increase efficiency, and the clock went on to invent what we today know as time. So, now we know no other time but the one measured by it. Once a humble factory timekeeper, a mere device to regulate work, it has now become as vital as the sun. But when it stops, you don’t lose the grip on time. You simply fall out of the global system of production. What the clock has produced for us is an industrial measure that suppresses all other ways to relate to time.

The grim tick-tock of industrial time can discipline our work but not our consciousness. Often in the busy clackety machine that was office, I could hear the faint whirr of my mind working in another time. In this personal time, there were no digits that menacingly pointed at different tasks and deadlines. It was a continuous interplay of past, present and future that James Joyce and Virginia Woolf had glimpsed a little and the Hindu scripture Yoga Vasishtha expounds in charming stories. I could not dive too deep into the stream of consciousness for the risk of bringing the office machine to a calamitous halt.

Once I left the machine, I could safely ignore artificial time and its many demands. When there is no clock to nag you, you can find that time and space are far more beautifully constructed than the clock face would suggest. Your inner clock can shrink or stretch time as the hands of hopes and memories move to the tick-tock of your breath. In the dark clockwork of your mind, you can even feel realisation glide into perception.

Once you opt out of the industrial time, you can wonder at the non-linear spread of your being. Those who slink out of the cycle of production can realise that life is not a straight line drawn from morning to evening or from the A of birth to the Z of death. There are numerous time cycles in nature. We are simultaneously alive in the trees, animals, stones and sand. Your body may still have the iron that was once part of a rock from the planet Mars. The squirrel that you have come to befriend — in the ample time you have once you are out of work, the industrial work that is — might also have that iron. Once you align with the larger cycles of nature, the sun rises in your forehead and the evenings sink in your heart. Looking into the sky, you can realise that the clock reduces the grand cycles of nature to an industrial routine where we are only workers and consumers who are unable to hear the music in our cells, which hum with the heartbeat of the galaxy. Just as a tree has its biological clock written down in rings, every person has his own creative clock. Freedom from the clock is a yearning for a counter-time where your personal work rhythm does not have to follow the beat of the global capitalist enterprise. The recent trend of flexi-hours points at the growing recognition that many people cannot adjust to the industrial time and they can be more productive if given the freedom to follow their own clocks. The present dehumanising work culture is a product of the cult of growth where we rarely question what and how much of it is enough for us. Once we draw the line at what and how much to produce, we will have enough scope to consider the randomness of creativity.

( Dharminder Kumar is a Delhi-based writer )

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