Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
LEWIS Carroll's imagination never ceases to amaze me. A suited rabbit with an ominously ticking antique pocket watch, who would have ever thought? But, what really stands intriguing in that bizarre image is the clock constantly ticking, driving the rabbit mad and keeping him at his wit's ends ... a shrewdly accurate portrayal of human existence.
It seems nowadays that everything works on fast forward. Life as we know it is accelerated to compete with the ever-morphing technological front.
Showers are shorter and conversations even more succinct, we scurry around with the fire of ambition alight in our eyes and a heart with no patience for emotion.
Clockwork, hasn't had a more accurate meaning. Day in and day out, we can map our actions and interactions, exactly as they will happen.
Trapped in ruts, we live 'predictable lives', a term, which in my opinion is a horrific oxymoron.
There is no excitement, no element of surprise - our lives may very well be a book in which the villain dies, vanquished and the princess rescued. Boring, clichŽ and just plain tedious to read.
We don't seem to have time for anything-else. The clock ticks like a dragon breathing down your neck. So much to do, so little time. Tick. Tock. Chop, chop.
And, as much as I search for it, I don't seem to be able to find the pause button.
Life just keeps going on, at warp speed and those that chose not to hang on to the ride, just get left behind. With every minute you waste, there's a lot of catching up to do.
So, we've essentially dug ourselves into a pit we've fortified. We've made everything quicker, smarter and more efficient, in a bid to add a little comfort and leisure to our lives and have instead quickened the pace.
Time is so abstract and yet so fundamentally incorporated. We run on it - it flows through our veins, our body ticks with its own rhythm, we resonate with life's chimes.
Yet, we're always late to pay our bills or hand in our maths homework.
Yes, time is strange indeed. And, like it or not, we're trapped in its infinite fabric.
I stop for a minute. Breathe in, out. And, I hear the crisp flicks of the clock hands.
Tick. They remind me of my place and my purpose.
Tock. They remind me not to dream, but to get on with life and scurry into the rat race of the world.
They remind me, as does Carroll's fascinating specimen of a rabbit, that I'm late, I'm late, I'm late.
Editor's note: Poor Sangeetha wrote this column for last week's GulfWeekly ... but missed the deadline!
