Skip to main content

Time and Colours of Flowers


I had a friend in Shillong whose favourite joke was about people not having enough time. A man was rushing. My friend asks him, “Why are you in such a hurry, man?” The response is, my friend says in his inimitable cynical way, “To reach home where he has nothing to do.”

Nothing to do is one of the greatest challenges of 21st century. Machines will do everything. Machines will wash your clothes, do your dishes, warm up your ready-to-cook food which in turn was made by another machine, clean your house in the meanwhile, drive you to your office, do most of your work in the office…

Soon Artificial Intelligence will take over even the little work you have in office. My students have already started submitting works written by Google’s Bard or Chat GPT for their project assignments. The charm of the whole affair is that these young fellas will teach you a lesson and more if you question them about the rightness of what they are doing. “Will you sweep your room if you have a robot to mop it within seconds?”

“Short cuts,” someone told me the other day about his son who is my student. “That’s what he likes. He says he learns English lessons from YouTube.” I’m redundant, I told myself. By the way, I’m quitting my job at the end of this month. 29 Feb is the last day of my life as a teacher. I hand over my job to Google Bard and Chat GPT and YouTube.

Maggie asks me what I will do with my time. I am an impatient person who is always in a hurry like the guy in my Shillong friend’s joke which is really not a joke unless you understand the joke called life.

What will I do with my time from 1 March 2024 onwards?

Amazon has already delivered three books for me to read. More are on the way. Still more will come in the due course of time. Then I will write about them in this space. Then? I will still have a lot of time, I know. So…

I will put soil and seeds in a pot and grow something. I will water the pot and watch the seed sprout, the sapling grow, the plant bloom… And I will stand before those flowers and contemplate on Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince’s rose. “It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”

I will waste time for my flower pots. I will get colours in return. Colours of flowers. Colours of life.

Previous Post: Meaning in the Time of Fraudulence

Labels:

Comments

  1. AnonymousFebruary 3, 2024 at 6:57 AM

    wonderful

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yamini MacLeanFebruary 3, 2024 at 7:23 AM

    Hari OM
    Oooh, retirement. I've certainly not been bored with mine!!! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  3. magiceyeFebruary 3, 2024 at 11:12 AM

    You have perfect plans for your retirement!

    ReplyDelete
  4. JayanthiFebruary 3, 2024 at 11:21 AM

    Happy retirement!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Preeti ChauhanFebruary 3, 2024 at 11:35 AM

    That's a good plan.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Rajeev MoothedathFebruary 3, 2024 at 8:29 PM

    A good post that sets the reader thinking...

    ReplyDelete
  7. Liz A.February 4, 2024 at 1:07 AM

    The AI writing stuff isn't good. When AI starts writing everything, people will stop reading. Why read when AI can read it for you? You're not irrelevant. What you teach is still important. But retirement is well deserved. Enjoy.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 4, 2024 at 10:20 AM

      This is just what has happened: they stopped reading altogether. They don't read even the textbooks.

      I'll make myself relevant here in this space. 😊

      Delete
  8. AnonymousFebruary 4, 2024 at 10:44 PM

    In Delhi, I always had that impression that we were the worst lot of students but after reading your blogs i have understood that students are more or less same everywhere. Anyways, have a happy retired life.
    - Yours notorious student:)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 5, 2024 at 7:46 AM

      Who is this self-professed notorious student? 😊

      Delete
    2. AnonymousFebruary 5, 2024 at 9:18 AM

      An expert in fooling around. I had a dual relationship with you: Love & Hate(mostly😅). An absolute trash as a student.I hope you will forgive me for all my sins thereby exhibiting a divine aspect in yourself. Sorry!!...but i don't have the courage to reveal my indentity, sometimes anonymity brings unconditional LOVE😊.Keep writing, Keep inspiring.
      - Yours regular reader:)

      Delete
    3. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 5, 2024 at 10:21 AM

      👍You have a rare spirit, I should say.

      Delete
  9. AnonymousFebruary 4, 2024 at 11:06 PM

    Lovely read ! Hope to read more interesting tales from you post retirement.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 5, 2024 at 7:47 AM

      Would certainly love your presence here.

      Delete
    2. Rama KashyapFebruary 5, 2024 at 6:55 PM

      I am Rama Kashyap. .. already into retirement phase . Have started posting my blogs on thjis platform. .

      Delete
    3. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 5, 2024 at 8:49 PM

      It'd be good if you link your name to your blog. We can reach the blog easily then.

      Delete
  10. Cindy D'SilvaFebruary 5, 2024 at 10:04 AM

    Wow, looking forward to more updates on your upcoming orchard. Happy retirement! Or was this a sarcastic article?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Shooting an Elephant

George Orwell [1903-1950] We had an anthology of classical essays as part of our undergrad English course. Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell was one of the essays. The horror of political hegemony is the core theme of the essay. Orwell was a subdivisional police officer of the British Empire in Burma (today Myanmar) when he was forced to shoot an elephant. The elephant had gone musth (an Urdu term for the temporary insanity of male elephants when they are in need of a female) and Orwell was asked to control the commotion created by the giant creature. By the time Orwell reached with his gun, the elephant had become normal. Yet Orwell shot it. The first bullet stunned the animal, the second made him waver, and Orwell had to empty the entire magazine into the elephant’s body in order to put an end to its mammoth suffering. “He was dying,” writes Orwell, “very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further…. It seeme...
13 comments
Read more

Urban Naxal

Fiction “We have to guard against the urban Naxals who are the biggest threat to the nation’s unity today,” the Prime Minister was saying on the TV. He was addressing an audience that stood a hundred metres away for security reasons. It was the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel which the Prime Minister had sanctified as National Unity Day. “In order to usurp the Sardar from the Congress,” Mathew said. The clarification was meant for Alice, his niece who had landed from London a couple of days back.    Mathew had retired a few months back as a lecturer in sociology from the University of Kerala. He was known for his radical leftist views. He would be what the PM calls an urban Naxal. Alice knew that. Her mother, Mathew’s sister, had told her all about her learned uncle’s “leftist perversions.” “Your uncle thinks that he is a Messiah of the masses,” Alice’s mother had warned her before she left for India on a short holiday. “Don’t let him infiltrate your brai...
14 comments
Read more

Bihar Election

Satish Acharya's Cartoon on how votes were bought in Bihar My wife has been stripped of her voting rights in the revised electoral roll. She has always been a conscientious voter unlike me. I refused to vote in the last Lok Sabha election though I stood outside the polling booth for Maggie to perform what she claimed was her duty as a citizen. The irony now is that she, the dutiful citizen, has been stripped of the right, while I, the ostensible renegade gets the right that I don’t care for. Since the Booth Level Officer [BLO] was my neighbour, he went out of his way to ring up some higher officer, sitting in my house, to enquire about Maggie’s exclusion. As a result, I was given the assurance that he, the BLO, would do whatever was in his power to get my wife her voting right. More than the voting right, what really bothered me was whether the Modi government was going to strip my wife of her Indian citizenship. Anything is possible in Modi’s India: Modi hai to Mumkin hai .   ...
14 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more