Time travel is all fiction. You get into a time machine, shut yourself in, and vroom! The next moment (oops! no ‘next moment’ in time travel) you show up in Akbar’s court, Asoka’s vihaara or Ajatashatru’s battlefield. Take care; the last guy killed his own pop.
Poppycock! This isn’t time travel; this is time teleportation, and all fiction—the kind of thing that Washington Irving (Rip van Winkle), H.G. Wells (The Time Machine) and Mark Twain (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court) fantasised about. You can’t go back in time. If you could, then you could go and kill an ancestor, and prevent your own birth.
Time travel, on the other hand, is real; you and I are doing it right now. Physicists would tell you, we are all travelling in time at the rate of one second a second. It’s another matter that the bloke who is waiting for his girlfriend in a park would think every second is an hour, and a guy with a black warrant on his head would think every hour is a second. But then, physics is neither about lovelorn hearts, nor about evil heads destined to hang.
What about travel through time? That’s different; many of us do it when we travel across time zones—taking off from Delhi at 6am on Monday, and landing in Dubai at 6am on Monday, after having flown for four hours.
My favourite time traveller is Phileas Fogg, Jules Verne’s hero in Around the World in Eighty Days. He unravelled the time-space matrix in the simplest way for duds like me to grasp. Fogg started off from London, travelled eastward for 80 days by train, steamer and an elephant (no airplane those days), but was back in London on the 79th day.
Fogged? Simple! Fogg travelled towards the sun. The days diminished for him by four minutes every time he crossed a longitudinal degree. The globe is 360 degrees; these 360 degrees multiplied by four minutes gives the 24 hours that he gained. While Fogg saw the sun pass the meridian 80 times, his London pals saw it only 79 times.
Still fogged? Then you are like Fogg’s companion Jean Passepartout who swore by his London watch. He was told to reset his watch when he travelled to other countries or his watch “won’t agree with the sun”. His reply: “too bad for the sun”.
We, in India, have only one time zone, and only one standard time, but there were a Madras time and a Calcutta time in the 19th century when Fogg crossed India on trains and an elephant. As it happened all over the world, the advent of trunk trains by the late 19th century compelled us to adopt a standard time in 1906.
There have since been demands to have at least two standard times—one for the east and the other for west. People in Kohima and Imphal complain they see sunrise at 5am or so in summer, but the official day starts much later. Consumer activist H.D. Shourie had filed a PIL seeking two standard times. Go clockwise—I suggested to him as a slogan for his campaign. He liked it.
Now the government is getting clock-wiser. The consumer affairs department has notified draft legal metrology rules which would compel you and me to sync our watches with the precise IST given out by five legal metrology labs that are guided by the Indian Space Research Organisation and the National Physical Laboratory. The rules would make navigators, telecommunicators, power grid operators, banks and digital agencies sync their clocks with the precise IST of microsecond accuracy.
In sync with the Narendra Modi style, they call it ‘One Nation, One Time’. Good job! But can the synced clocks make our trains run on time?
prasannan@theweek.in