Clockwork Orange

"We had undefined spaces to live our childhoods in, as long as we were home by dark" 

The blue notebook, half-filled with attendance policies, dress code policies, and cell phone policies, the 'late fine' slips, and the cleverly concealed rubber bands that kept our saggy socks in place have synthesized into a dyschronometric actuality- three lectures punctuated by four treks to the tea-shop, a four-minute lunch of frozen grilled cheese and a near-empty conference room at sundown forcibly- and spitefully- cutting short the valedictory speech. More importantly, this cataclysmic shift to a disaggregated, nebulous time-web was followed by a more extensive understanding of the temporal standardization that the entire organizational culture of the school system relied on. And one that I had somehow managed to flee from, in the three-and-a-half hours of cassette-hunting that was effectively squeezed in between two classes. Clock hours and calendar days have gradually faded into university fests, conference schedules, metal gigs, and lectures extending, unnoticed, into the mandated lunch break hours. I have three modes of transportation to choose from. The late afternoon sky dribbles into a bright orange pool, creating sharp outlines on the blue subway seats- I choose to miss it, owing to my newfound interest in the shoegaze genre, and an hour-long textual trip through the orgiastic poetics of Roland Barthes. 

 

If there is one institution that can resist the colonization of time, that can 'write (here: announce) back' and subvert the rise of the power of mechanical clocks, it is, I assume, the Indian Railways. 

"Yatrigan kripya dhyan dijiye, gaari sankhya 34512..."

 

"A six-hour delay?"

The hegemonic metronome is thus effectively fractured. And of course, those luckless commuters who cannot conveniently shift to a second mode of conveyance choose to not acknowledge what just went down- the decolonization of the clock and the colonial time it monumentalizes.