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 Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...
121 comments
Read more

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
44 comments
Read more

Romance in Utopia

Book Review Title: My Haven Author: Ruchi Chandra Verma Pages: 161 T his little novel is a surfeit of sugar and honey. All the characters that matter are young employees of an IT firm in Bengaluru. One of them, Pihu, 23 years and all too sweet and soft, falls in love with her senior colleague, Aditya. The love is sweetly reciprocated too. The colleagues are all happy, furthermore. No jealousy, no rivalry, nothing that disturbs the utopian equilibrium that the author has created in the novel. What would love be like in a utopia? First of all, there would be no fear or insecurity. No fear of betrayal, jealousy, heartbreak… Emotional security is an essential part of any utopia. There would be complete trust between partners, without the need for games or power struggles. Every relationship would be built on deep understanding, where partners complement each other perfectly. Miscommunication and misunderstanding would be rare or non-existent, as people would have heightened emo...
9 comments
Read more

Tanishq and the Patriots

Patriots are a queer lot. You don’t know what all things can make them pick up the gun. Only one thing is certain apparently: the gun for anything. When the neighbouring country behaves like a hoard of bandicoots digging into our national borders, we will naturally take up the gun. But nowadays we choose to redraw certain lines on the map and then proclaim that not an inch of land has been lost. On the other hand, when a jewellery company brings out an ad promoting harmony between the majority and the minority populations, our patriots take up the gun. And shoot down the ad. Those who promote communal harmony are traitors in India today. The sacred duty of the genuine Indian patriot is to hate certain communities, rape their women, plunder their land, deny them education and other fundamental rights and basic requirements. Tanishq withdrew the ad that sought to promote communal harmony. The patriot’s gun won. Aapka Bharat Mahan. In the novel Black Hole which I’m writing there is...
61 comments
Read more

A Lesson from Little Prince

I joined the #WriteAPageADay challenge of Blogchatter , as I mentioned earlier in another post. I haven’t succeeded in writing a page every day, though. But as long as you manage to write a minimum of 10,000 words in the month of Feb, Blogchatter is contented. I woke up this morning feeling rather vacant in the head, which happens sometimes. Whenever that happens to me but I do want to get on with what I should, I fall back on a book that has inspired me. One such book is Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince . I have wished time and again to meet Little Prince in person as the narrator of his story did. We might have interesting conversations like the ones that exist in the novel. If a sheep eats shrubs, will he also eat flowers? That is one of the questions raised by Little Prince [LP]. “A sheep eats whatever he meets,” the narrator answers. “Even flowers that have thorns?” LP is interested in the rose he has on his tiny planet. When he is told that the sheep will eat f...
8 comments
Read more