What keeps the fool in me delighted

A flash essay on 'TIME'

Note: This flash essay is part of a collaborative, constrained-writing challenge undertaken by some members of the Bangalore Substack Writers Group. Each of us examined the concept of ‘TIME’ through our unique perspective, distilled into roughly 400 words. At the bottom of this snippet, you’ll find links to other essays by fellow writers.

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Image credits: Utsav Mamoria (Tumse Na Ho Paayega)

Time is to life what grammar is to prose, rhythm is to poetry. We mould and remould it to squeeze some discernible meaning out of our worthless lives. When we decide to record these meanings either in language or music or painting, we play a little trick on time. We try to freeze it. Every piece of creation is a miniature of time captured in the form of a blog post, a song, an artwork, and so on. But captured for whom? Of course, for anyone who cares to spend their ‘time’ consuming it. It’s not us who’s playing a trick on time. It’s the other way around. It’s only in the passage of time that anything can exist, and any attempt at freezing it is an invitation to be made a fool of. But is it not fun to be made a fool of?

A few lines from a poem of the Hindi poet Muktibodh (translation by AK Mehrotra) go something like this —

बेवक़ूफ़ बनने के ख़ातिर ही
सब तरफ़ अपने को लिए-लिए फिरता हूँ;
और यह सब देख बड़ा मज़ा आता है
कि मैं ठगा जाता हूँ...
हृदय में मेरे ही,
प्रसन्न-चित्त एक मूर्ख बैठा है
हँस-हँसकर अश्रुपूर्ण, मत्त हुआ जाता है,
कि जगत्...स्वायत्त हुआ जाता है।

Everywhere I go
I’m made a fool of,
But that’s why I go;
I get a lot of pleasure
To see others rip me off. 
The idiot in my heart
Has tears of laughter in his eyes,
Delighted that the world’s becoming
This autonomous place. 

It is this little game of trying to fool time and getting ripped off by it in return is what must have started in me the itch to write. Of course, the internet could have done without another generic newsletter. But could I have done without it?

Mehfil allows me to play this little game with time. In my newsletter, I write about my experiences of going out, sitting in, reading or listening to something, and so on. In a lot of posts, I use the work of artists I admire. At times, as a crutch to help my thoughts go for a walk. Or at times just to put their work in front of my readers and say with as much emphasis as possible (with exclamation mark and all) — look at this piece, isn’t it something! This is what keeps the fool in me delighted.

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Essays by fellow writers —

• “So… When will shit actually hit the fan?” by Sailee, sunny climate stormy climate

• Time: I Just Want to See It, Watch It Move by Abhishek Singh, The Comic Dreamer

• Timekeepers - Retracing the Universe’s Deep-Time Signatures by Devayani Khare, Geosophy

• Keeping Time by Reshma Apte, Fanciful Senorita

• Locating Myself In The Map of Time by Priyanka Sacheti, A Home For Homeless Thoughts

• The Thing We Pretend To Understand by Avinash Shenoy, OfftheWalls

• The lost intimacy with time by Siddharth Batra, Siddharth’s substack

• Lessons Time Taught Me by Aryan Kavan Gowda, Wonderings of a Wanderer

• A Time for Worship by Vaibhav Gupta, Thorough and Unkempt

• “Tata Mummy Tata” by Rakhi Anil, Rakhi’s Substack

• The vicious cycle of sixteen - A dancer’s take on keeping time by Eshna Benegal, The Deep Cut

• How long is twenty years? by Richa Vadini Singh, Here’s What I Think

• How mystery writers play with the clock by Gowri N Kishore, About Murder, She Wrote

• TIME INFLATED, JUSTICE DEFLATED. by Lavina G, The Nexus Terrain

• The endless ebb and flow of Time by Siddarth RG, Siddarth’s Newsletter

• Time, please! by Shaili Desai - Litcurry

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