Do you have the time?

The lockdown, enforced to prevent spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, has brought to the fore a range of physical and mental challenges, despite the fact that many are fortunate to be confined in their own homes, with all basic facilities and access to essential items. It is migrant labour, the homeless and the impoverished who are facing real world problems that require great fortitude and social and institutional intervention for any respite to happen.

When we fervently wish for something — for example, for more than 24 hours in a day — and blame all setbacks and unfilled tasks to the lack of it, one would assume that when it is made available in abundance, all troubles would evaporate. Wrong.

In an Aesop’s Fable, a character says, ‘Be careful what you wish for; it may come true!’ It is hard to think of anyone who might not have wished for more time.

And now that the lockdown has saved many of us from the daily commute, from socialising, from frequenting entertainment venues, eating out and so on, thereby suddenly gifting us with all the time that we always yearned for, the wish-come-true is not being taken so kindly.

‘I don’t get enough time to exercise’ was a common refrain among office-goers.

Faced now with ‘gym workouts’ at home in the form of household tasks like cleaning, cooking, laundry, ironing and what not, one hears constant complaints of how terrible and tiring it is, oh, how boring it is.… Even reading, watching movies and playing board games seem tiresome, again, things we yearned to have time for, but now regard as time pass.