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

Waiting for the Mahatma

Book Review I read this book purely by chance. R K Narayan is not a writer whom I would choose for any reason whatever. He is too simple, simplistic. I was at school on Saturday last and I suddenly found myself without anything to do though I was on duty. Some duties are like that: like a traffic policeman’s duty on a road without any traffic! So I went up to the school library and picked up a book which looked clean. It happened to be Waiting for the Mahatma by R K Narayan. A small book of 200 pages which I almost finished reading on the same day. The novel was originally published in 1955, written probably as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and India’s struggle for independence. The edition that I read is a later reprint by Penguin Classics. Twenty-year-old Sriram is the protagonist though Gandhi towers above everybody else in the novel just as he did in India of the independence-struggle years. Sriram who lives with his grandmother inherits significant wealth when he turns 20. Hi...
9 comments
Read more

The Lights of December

The crib of a nearby parish [a few years back] December was the happiest month of my childhood. Christmas was the ostensible reason, though I wasn’t any more religious than the boys of my neighbourhood. Christmas brought an air of festivity to our home which was otherwise as gloomy as an orthodox Catholic household could be in the late 1960s. We lived in a village whose nights were lit up only by kerosene lamps, until electricity arrived in 1972 or so. Darkness suffused the agrarian landscapes for most part of the nights. Frogs would croak in the sprawling paddy fields and crickets would chirp rather eerily in the bushes outside the bedroom which was shared by us four brothers. Owls whistled occasionally, and screeched more frequently, in the darkness that spread endlessly. December lit up the darkness, though infinitesimally, with a star or two outside homes. December was the light of my childhood. Christmas was the happiest festival of the period. As soon as school closed for the...
14 comments
Read more

A Government that Spies on Citizens

Illustration by Copilot Designer India has officially decided to keep an eagle eye on its citizens. Modi government has asked all smartphone manufacturers to preinstall a government app, Sanchar Saathi , on every phone in such a way that no citizen can ever uninstall it. The firms have been also ordered to install the app on existing phones too using software-update technology. The stated objective is to strengthen cybersecurity and protect users from fraud. The question is why any government should go out of its way to impose “security” on its citizens. For over a month now, I have been receiving a message every single day from the Government of India’s Telecom Department to install the app on my phone. I wanted to block the sender, but there is no such option. Even that message is an imposition. I don’t trust any government that imposes benefits on me. “ Beneficent beasts of prey ,” Robert Frost would call such governments. When Modi government imposes security on me, I ha...
8 comments
Read more

Schrödinger’s Cat and Carl Sagan’s God

Image by Gemini AI “Suppose a patriotic Indian claims, with the intention of proving the superiority of India, that water boils at 71 degrees Celsius in India, and the listener is a scientist. What will happen?” Grandpa was having his occasional discussion with his Gen Z grandson who was waiting for his admission to IIT Madras, his dream destination. “Scientist, you say?” Gen Z asked. “Hmm.” “Then no quarrel, no fight. There’d be a decent discussion.” Grandpa smiled. If someone makes some similar religious claim, there could be riots. The irony is that religions are meant to bring love among humans but they end up creating rift and fight. Scientists, on the other hand, keep questioning and disproving each other, and they appreciate each other for that. “The scientist might say,” Gen Z continued, “that the claim could be absolutely right on the Kanchenjunga Peak.” Grandpa had expected that answer. He was familiar with this Gen Z’s brain which wasn’t degenerated by Instag...
10 comments
Read more