s w i f t s  &  s l o w s: a quarterly of crisscrossings

abandoning time
Chitra Gopalakrishnan & Partha Ghosh

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Abandoning time, time and time again

There are many things we can do with time
There is one which we haven’t managed yet: to understand it

I knew time to be what the clocks read, seconds, minutes and hours
As a progression of events, the past to the present into the future
Time, I understood, is not something I can see, touch or taste but measure
The study of devices that measure time, I learnt, is called horology
Time, I was also told, is the fourth dimension of reality
One that describes events in our three-dimensional space

Now I am told time is an illusion

That it does not exist in any sense nor does it flow sequentially
That the universe is a giant block of all things that happen at any time, at any place
So the past, present and future all exist simultaneously in different dimensions
That the future will not unfold, the past is not inaccessible
And the ‘now’ of the present, fluid and passing, is only in our heads.

This way or that I don’t know, what I know are the bounds of my understanding
I have come to abandon everything I know about time…about life…to embrace paradox

Poem by Chitra Gopalakrishnan. Visual poem by Partha Ghosh.

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Chitra Gopalakrishnan, a New Delhi-based journalist and a social development communications consultant uses her ardor for writing, wing to wing, to break firewalls between nonfiction and fiction, narratology and psychoanalysis, marginalia and manuscript and tree-ism and capitalism. Website →

Partha Ghosh is a Media & Communications professional straddling the world of advertising and film-making primarily as a wordsmith. Based in New Delhi, Partha actively pursues the dynamics of photography with the belief that “a frame, like light, changes everything”.