Time's Up!

Hyderabad’s tendency for mass procrastination in any public event seems to be an epidemic as wildly rampant as a plague in medieval England. It's like the entire city is functioning in a different time zone but nobody bothered to inform me. In Hyderabad, people treat arriving late as a birthright, like they treat the right to breathe or the right to put up really bad theatre productions. I can only imagine the utter chaos that would ensue if every single local train in Bombay was to be delayed by ten minutes or more. Disoriented and confused, train-goers would pour out into the streets and get run over by the next BEST bus hurtling down the road. But what if everything in Hyderabad started exactly on time? Would there be anarchy on the streets, as rioters went about smashing every clock they see? Is it really so terrible, they would yell, if we want to turn up whenever we feel like as long as it’s within 12 hours of the appointed time? Or maybe Hyderabadis are a highly evolved species who recognise time’s inherently illusory nature and have made an untimely resolution that something needs to be done right away… or maybe after ten minutes?


Of course, there are some who are aware that unpunctuality can be viewed as a social nuisance, often resulting in headaches, heightened blood pressure and just a general feeling of ill-will among those subject to this slow torture. A supposed quick fix solution found by some people is to set their watches ten minutes forward. The reasoning is, I presume, that if you have a tendency to be late, setting your watch ten minutes ahead will give you an adequate heads up to ensure that you get to the proposed destination miraculously on time. But how is that supposed to work for the habitually tardy? If you know you've set your watch ten minutes ahead, won't you naturally factor that into all your subsequent appointments? And if you were the one who set the time ahead, who are you trying to fool exactly? Unless of course these people have an added, equally annoying habit of being clinically forgetful, and don't remember that they’ve set their watches ahead of time, every single time. If so, how stupid must you feel when you realise that you just fooled yourself… again?

And why always ten minutes? Sometimes five but mostly ten and never more. Being irrepressibly punctual myself (I couldn't be late if I tried) and hence turning up at said place before everybody else, I'd just like you self-righteous chronotyrants to know that if you're late, you’ve in all likelihood crossed the ten minute barrier which supposedly makes your complete disrespect for other people’s time less criminal. So don't give me a frantic call and tell me you'll be five minutes late - I've been around in this world sipping coffees I don't want to drink and flipping through magazines I don’t particularly want to read long enough to know that if you say five minutes, I'd better settle in for some serious alone time with myself. In fact, I suggest if you ever want to indulge yourself in deep contemplation about yourself and the world, just fix a meet with your most sluggish friend.

Quite obviously, setting watches forward doesn’t seem to do much for those invariably left waiting but gives latecomers the false comfort of knowing that they're not as late as their watches says they are, which in turn, only makes them even more late! The only real solution to this is to give your watch to a friend, ask him to change the time by ten minutes, only not tell you whether it's ahead or behind.