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
37 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
13 comments
Read more

Fantasy

  My nights are generally haunted by nightmares. Amorphous creatures who pretend to be benign lead me on familiar paths and leave me in alien territories. I had a surprise last night, however. I was abandoned in some kind of a wonderland where everyone smiled like angels who were carrying some happy message to some Virgin Mary somewhere. Yet another virgin birth. The dream left me in a half-awake state. I knew I wasn’t dreaming. I knew I was fantasising. And I found it all quite amusing. Here are some of those delightful fantasies of semi-wokeness. One All the money in the world’s banks, all banks included, is distributed equally to all the adults in the world. Ambani, Adani, Advani, Kolani, Indrani, Malini, Shalini… everyone on earth now has equal wealth. And everyone is told by some mysterious angel that they will always have the same wealth as anyone else on earth as long as they don’t misuse it. If they misuse it – on drugs, for example – then the amount spent won’t be replen
14 comments
Read more

Women as Victims or Survivors

Book Title: The Blue Scarf and other stories Author: Anu Singh Choudhary Translator: Kamayani Sharma Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2023 Pages: 188 There is no doubt that the Indian social system is overtly patriarchal and hence a lot of women endure restrictions of all sorts. There are exceptions like the matrilineal tribes of the Northeast. The 12 short stories in this volume by Anu Singh Choudhary focus on some women from the patriarchal societies of India, particularly North India. Originally written in Hindi, the stories have been translated quite effortlessly by Kamayani Sharma though the book does show a few signs of poor proofreading. The very first story, First Look , shows us the rising aspirations of a few women from a remote village and the futility of those aspirations in a world where even marriage is a business deal. “With this deal, we’re interested only in maximizing profits for both parties,” The boy’s father says. But the girl’s family can’t ever tou
4 comments
Read more

Everything is Politics

Politics begins to contaminate everything like an epidemic when ideology dies. Death of ideology is the most glaring fault line on the rock of present Indian democracy. Before the present regime took charge of the country, political parties were driven by certain underlying ideologies though corruption was on the rise from Indira Gandhi’s time onwards. Mahatma Gandhi’s ideology was rooted in nonviolence. Nothing could shake the Mahatma’s faith in that ideal. Nehru was a staunch secularist who longed to make India a nation of rational people who will reap the abundant benefits proffered by science and technology. Even the violent left parties had the ideal of socialism to guide them. The most heartless political theory of globalisation was driven by the ideology of wealth-creation for all. When there is no ideology whatever, politics of the foulest kind begins to corrode the very soul of the nation. And that is precisely what is happening to present India. Everything is politics
25 comments
Read more