A Profound
Peregrination
You
must remember dear Higgins, of my oft-repeated desire to travel to that exalted
land of the Himalayas and Vedic wisdom. Ho ho, you will say, snake charmers and
elephants et al. But I must tell you dear chap, it’s all here, the Hindoostani
fellows have got it right all the way.
I was
on this train from Bombay to Delhi, they call the city Moombai now, after some
old devi. Well to my singular good fortune, I was seated next to this rather
dingy looking young chap in a faded shirt and a loongi of sorts. He had this
matted dreadlock hair (a sure sign of ancient wisdom, I have always held) and
wore nothing on his feet (even more profound).
Just
as I was observing his otherworldly appearance, he turns to me with a
gap-toothed grin and asks of me: ‘Saar, what is time?’
My
dear Higgins, scarcely could I have asked for a better initiation into the
esoteric realms of Hindoostan. What is time! How many hours have we spent in
long debate over many a pipe in your study, how many years have our peers at
Triflebotham College vexed over this conundrum!
Is time merely a measuring system used to
sequence events, to compare durations of events and the intervals between them?
Or is time part of the fundamental structure of the universe, a realist
dimension in which events occur in sequence, as old Newton told us? Or do we
subscribe to Leibnitz and Kant’s view of time being an intellectual structure
like ‘space’ and ‘number’?
The
question begged of an answer and he transfixed me with his yellow eyes, this
ascetic bloke. Should I tell him a second is the duration of 9,192,631,770
periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two
hyperfine levels of the ground state of the Caesium 33 atom?
But
nay, I sensed he wanted a metaphysical answer. He had sensed in me a worthy
intellectual companion and without hesitation had forayed into Sophia’s
kingdom. But as I faltered, he seemed to doze off to the rhythmic rumble of the
train and left me to confabulate with myself.
Is
time linear as our Judeo-Christian beliefs tell us, dear Higgins, or is it
cyclic as the jolly old Mayans, Incas and the Hindoos themselves aver? Should I
emulate St.Augustine when he said ‘What then is time? If no one asks me, I
know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not.’
There
is no halfway. As I was about to make a choice between being a Newtonian and a
total Kant, the blessed old mystic opened his eyes and asked of me:
‘Saar,
where you going?’
You
could have knocked me o’er with a feather, Higgins, a feather nonetheless! How
did this wretched old rishi come up with Zeno’s Paradox of Unreachability?
I did
undoubtedly have in my pocket a first-class ticket to Delhi. In a certain time
I would cross half the distance from Moombai to Delhi. And in a while more I
would cross half of half and go on to half of the half of the half ad
infinitum. I would mathematically and physically never reach the capital city.
I and my good ascetic friend would be lost in an infinitesimally slow journey
to Delhi. We would probably die before we reached there. I was actually going
nowhere and I was going to die before reaching there!
And
that is precisely why his last oracle to me was the most earthshaking. His stop
had come up and he stood, plucking the folds of his loongi from the recesses of
his buttocks. He smiled and he said:
‘Will
meet again, saar!’
The
continuum, Higgins, the continuum! How effortlessly he had mastered the all-encompassing convergence of the time-space-energy continuum. We would perish
someday, perhaps on some abominably paradoxical journey to some godforsaken
and timeforsaken place. And we would merge into the continuum, become one with
the Collective Unconsciousness! We would indeed meet again at that moment,
indefinable by Kantian or Newtonian time. Just meeting each other, not knowing
we are meeting, but just knowing everything together as a cosmic force! In
death we would meet again in a divinely compassionate train!
The
sheer magnitude hit me like a booted hoof in the bollocks, and tears flowed
down my cheeks. The sheer Karmic serendipity of my train journey shook my
intellect as no discourse at Triflebotham ever had.
I
walked around the Delhi Station in a daze for a while. I couldn’t find my
wallet in my trouser pocket, must have left it on some table in Moombai in my
absentmindedness.
But I
dwelt in this metaphysical euphoria for many days, Higgins old boy, weeping
like an old girl, repenting for all my sins. When I get home, do set up a
lecture with Professor Gluteus Maximus at our alma mater. I must hold forth on
Hindoo mysticism, dear chap. What a journey! What a profound peregrination,
indeed!
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Really brilliant!
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