Time, the Great Stealer

Foreword
This piece is my tribute to life's sense of irony and humour, described quite succinctly by a certain Mr. Shakespeare, William:
"I wasted time, and now doth time waste me".

There comes a time in the life of a performer, when he realizes that despite being on stage, he is really an observer, and it is actually in the rings that the circus is going on. This realization does not come easily; it comes after great periods of intense reflection, when the Buddha manifests himself in his simple trick. A trick that he had conjured innumerable times, yet which now appears entirely novel to him. He begins to see the sleaziness of life as opposed to its perceived portentousness. And amongst all this, he realizes that the true villain is time. It is time that gives life its initial flightiness and quickly conceals it in a veil of all encompassing darkness. Not that either impression is correct: both, really, are projections from the observer's mind, on the screen of time.

How do I know this? Did the Buddha appear before me? Did he give me The Knowledge? To answer, I will have to tell you a story...
(To those who are wondering if I'm schizophrenic, let me put your fears to rest: most people who know me are of the opinion that I don’t even have enough of one personality, let alone multiple personalities.)

The story begins when I was involved in an unusually weighty intellectual exercise, viz., watching television. I was engrossed in watching the haphazard fractals of advertisements, which, quite irritatingly, were interrupted by regular features. Suddenly, the room turned fragrant, the lights grew soft and a gentle breeze started blowing in my 5th storey apartment with common walls on 3 sides. For Aishwarya Rai had appeared on screen, for a French cosmetic company, detailing the benefits of a particular hair colour. She ended her eulogy to the dye by saying, "And not a single gray". Snap! The air wasn't fragrant anymore, the midday sun was harsh and the gentle breeze just died. "Gray???" Aishwarya Rai, the epitome of beauty, timeless, ageless is now campaigning for hair dyes! It was then that I realized that time had struck. Ash was now 32, which is a perfectly ignoble age for any woman to be, more so if she looks like Aishwarya Rai and is single.

I thought I heard the villain laugh his hollow laugh and realization set in. The present would wilt, curl up and die, giving way to the future, which would really be the present of some arrogant young people. These, in turn, would be completely drunk on the power of their youth or illusions of it, before they lost hair and gained weight. It is a vicious circle! I could almost see the day when, as a pensioner on a park bench I hear the youngsters call to each other, "Watched a really crappy movie last night, some "Mohabbatein" or something, and guess what, my grandma says that Shahrukh Khan was a heartthrob!" and watch them roll on the ground, convulsed with laughter. I recall doing the same when my mom told me that Rajesh Khanna had been a superstar. This is the lone silver lining: the kids in the future (at least in my reverie) have excellent taste, for Shahrukh's popularity is certainly the only thing in the present I would like to conceal from the snobbish Martian lady, when she comes. Think about the irony of life, having ridiculed mom's generation for making Rajesh Khanna a superstar, I have to bear the cross of Shahrukh Khan's being a heartthrob.

All that would have been fine, had it been in the domain of SEP (Someone Else's Problem, originally defined by Douglas Adams in 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'). In that case, like all self-respecting Indians who do not interfere in others' affairs, unless it involves a cheap story about their daughters, I would have stayed away from it. It was only when time started making my life miserable that I started perceiving its tortures. I had once been an innocent, good looking and intelligent young guy with a blossoming love life and a full head of hair. (Ok, stop the sniggering, I may not have been the other things, but I definitely had a full head of hair.) And today, time has tricked me into being, lets say, a person with not so full a head of hair and a paunch. I expect the entire intelligent fraction of the human race (which according to a recent estimate by Standard and Poor is .013%) to comprehend the magnitude of the blow dealt to me by time.

I have stoically borne a host of time's brutalities: some painful and some very painful. Most of you are already aware of the affair (or the lack of it) with Katrina and, on a separate occasion, Aishwarya; those being among the more painful ones. Despite all this, I do not have any hard feelings for time. I reckon you cannot afford to be belligerent, especially when time is not on your side.