Bull's Eye

What’s half-an-hour, you aks. A nanoblip in the life of this ageless nation. People might not even notice...isn’t Indian Standard Time another name for an elastic band? And in an absolute sense, you don’t gain anything—it’s all purely notional. The politics too could be tricky. ("Distributing 30 minutes free to everyone by decree? It’s a poll sop, worthy of Tughlak!" Or, "It’s a UPA ploy to buy time. Like Mugabe’s economics—if the treasury be empty, print more notes.") Also, what if the next regime, more alive to the allure of the longue duree, takes cue and secedes altogether from the International Dateline, pitchforking us all to 2064 Vikram Samvat! ("If they don’t sell us uranium, we’ll explode a time-bomb. And if the world is really round, who’s to say the sun first rose over Nauru and not Nagpur?")

Be not churlish. Think it through. Whether you see time as empty duration or bristling calendar, measure it with coffee spoons or prefer prosaic horology, whether you’re poet, corporate exec, late latif... this concerns us all. But the timing of the shift will be crucial. What if you were stuck in an elevator with Kenny G playing—could you be stuck forever? What if Vajpayee has just paused after the first words of a speech...and we shift...right into infinitude. (Now, that’ll be one helluva hung parliament.)

If you’re old enough, think a Ramesh Krishnan-Mcnroe match. Ramesh serves. Since this usually takes about an hour to reach, Mac has gone over to finish his breakfast. The new time kicks in precisely half-way into this, just as the yellow orb is poised, quivering, over the net. An extra half-hour here means, applying Zeno’s paradox, the ball never reaches! The world stops, Mac holds an eternally unfinished burger in his hands. A journo, slipping out of this time-warp, writes the ultimate sports report: ‘A tennis match on the edge of time. Indian maestro, with magic-light touch, sends Slazenger spinning into abyss’.