Crawling Time

          My mother-in-law is the most conservative person I have ever spoken to. She is 90. She speaks only of the days past and she narrated one of her experiences of a boy aged 28, meeting her in a market place when she was 60. He was her friend’s son. When he saw her, he immediately recognised her and came to her and held her hand and talked to her openly in front of all the people there . She felt very odd, she was saying to me, “Just imagine what would the people think about our relationship? I know I’m old but still I’m a girl isn’t it? For me I felt funny, actually I had a real hard time to keep a straight face but for her it was a very humiliating experience.    

          Just imagine if she had openly said to my kids or the kids of this generation, it would be a cool party joke. But think about the fear she might  have had for sometime and even to speak about it too now she feels odd. But there is nothing odd if we hadn’t had the advancement of technology, the multimedia, the etc... It has really changed our outlook, our culture.

We have studied history in schools, we study lots of things in this subject about the people, their past, their way of living, etc... For each time period they created history. The history itself is divided into stone age, iron age, etc... etc... then what would this age be? nano age? or techy age? I don’t know, but one thing is sure we are not aware of the passage of time, its just flying and no achievement for me to be proud of. But in fact a galore of achievements has happened for human race.

          I feel like Rip Van Winkly (feminine of Rip Van Winkle) I don’t know whether you know the story, but I’ll say to you. Rip was a very nice man, loved by his children and by the villagers but not by his wife. She always nagged him. He liked the wilderness, he walks with his gun and his dog alone in the wild. One day as he was going through the forest, he met some dwarfs, playing ninepins and he secretly drank their ale. He felt very tired and slept there. After sometime he woke up and found that his dress were dirty and tattered. His gun rusted, his beard one foot long and he couldn’t find his dog. He came out of the forest and found that his village had completely changed and he asked about his wife and he was told that she was dead and when he stated that he was Rip Van Winkle trouble started because there was another person with the same name and he was Rip’s son. Then he came to know that he had been sleeping for 20 years. Lots had changed. This is what has happened for the 20^th century, the speed with the time is going, I don’t know whether I could keep up with it.

          There was a time when laptops were called laptops but now its just lap and when I first heard it I thought it was the running circuit laps, you know the 5000m race or 10000m race, etc.. and I have felt proud of myself thinking that I’m up-to-date in tech wise and this lap business made me feel a real stone age person. Now I know, that our time is being fast forwarded to 6x speed with inventions in 32 x speed. Better have a notepad or is it i-pad? to keep tag of history.

          Time is one thing we have to keep tag on all the minute details of our day to day experience because at every juncture we are having some changes which really revolutionize history, just like in a hindi movie “Jab We Met”, the heroine misses the train and the station master says to her, “Look you are a girl you should be careful, you are like an open treasure box, a small bend in the rail causes a change in direction for miles.”

          That’s what has happened of our history, multitudes and multitudes of inventions and changes and changes of this and that. I was thinking, if ever I live to be 90 as my mother-in-law, what would I be saying? Are you kidding? 90 yeaaaaaaars.  Forget about history just allow myself to live for the time being, its as itself a “Nightmare”. I feel like holding a speeding roller coaster with a single hand and out of seat with my dress intact. Don’t laugh eh? I’m a bit conservative too in that matter O.K?

                    Bye for now and see you tomorrow.

Meena