Punctuality

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I have observed that habitually unpunctual folks are habitually intolerant of others' occasional unpunctuality...they go berserk if they are made to wait.

Let me cite an exemplary specimen:

The other day Ishani and her mom were arriving from Tirupati by the Narayanadri Express (after an absence from Hyderabad for all of FIVE days) scheduled to arrive at 6.30 AM. My son and I wanted to receive and fetch them home. My son went to bed at 2 AM after coming home at 1 AM. And he asked me to get ready positively by 5.45 AM sharp. I asked him what was the big hurry...and he said: "Ishani is coming!" Since nowadays I go to bed at about 4.30 AM, that was no big deal for me to keep awake.

I had my early ablutions and, knowing him, got ready by 6 AM, and was waiting for him to emerge from his bedroom. And you know what it is to wait...every second feels like an hour. At 6.15, I decided to make some tea...and entered the kitchen. At 6.16 there was an explosion and he was shouting: "Dad! Where are you? I asked you to be ready by 5.45!"

And we ran down and I sat beside him in his car...and tried to relax. He is, to put it mildly, a petulant driver. He would love to cover the 30 KM in 15 minutes. But in Hyderabad it is not enough if you are a teetotaler...you have to assume that everyone else is drinking and driving. He doesn't believe in the Newton's First Law about going uniformly in a straight line. He swerves this way that to beat all other vehicles. And he is about the only one in the twin cities who honks (others know it is no use). 'Peeeeee!' means a dog is in the way. 'Pip...pip...pip...pip!' means a truck...and so on. And since he now drives a sedan with AC and windows closed, he knows there is no use shouting....so he gestures wildly and unspeakably...At 6.30 he gets a call that they are at Bibinagar, 15 minutes away. He revs, races, and rants, and we arrive at 6.45 and rush in...to be told that they are still at Bibinagar waiting for clearance...and he lets off his steam at the unpunctuality of Indian Railways...

He was not like that when he was a student at IIT KGP. It is this software job that screwed up his time-keeping. They have this flexi-time, work-from-home, light-lelo, and stuff...the only constraint is that the job gets done and moolah in...

Frankly this so-called Puctuality is alien to us Indians and it is an imposition by our British Rulers. As RKN said elsewhere, an hour or two this way or that makes no difference to us whose preoccupation is ever with Eternity.

Not that we were not aware of Nature's own time-keeping...our Vedic Hymns extol again and again the so-called Ritu, symbolizing Nature's Rhythm. Kalidas also wrote his Ritusamhaara...eloquently describing the march of seasons. And our astronomers (we never had astrophysicists) could predict the eclipses knowing that they follow an unyielding cycle. But that is about all...let Heavens keep their punctuality and let us relax and write poetry.

Not that the Westerners were any better before Galileo spoiled all fun and invented his pendulum clock, which can reasonably be considered as the beginning of mankind's slavery to time. Planets were supposed, etymologically, to wander. Copernicus said gently: "It isn't they who wander...it is us!" and showed that they all move in perfect orbits keeping perfect time. I was amazed when I read that astronomers of yore discovered that the inmost planet Mercury was not quite keeping its expected closed orbit but its perihelion advances by 43 seconds of an arc per century...My! My!! My!!!...a right angle is 90 degrees (inexplicably...why not go metric?)...a degree has sixty minutes...and a minute has sixty seconds...and a century has 100 X 365 X 24 X 60 X 60 = 315360000 odd seconds ;-)

How the Heaven could they figure THAT out!!!

And it was left to Einstein and his fan Eddington to explain that away...sort of...actually it was about 560 secs of arc but Newtonian Gravity and Mechanics could explain away all but those 43...incidentally Newton's Gravity and his Mechanics were two separate subjects, no? But in nonlinear Einstein's, the two are messed up inextricably, yes? I forgot my Weinberg...

So, planets are rather more punctual than my son of a fun.

Galaxies apparently are not punctual enough...

Yesterday I was reading Martin Rees prediction that our own home, the Milky Way Galaxy is about to collide soon enough with our nearby neighbor, Andromeda, and sputter and spatter and scatter to form what is pleasantly called the khichiri: Milkomeda.

Very punctually...in precisely 4 billion years...give or take a billion...

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