The first story I was told about time, when I was about six years old, came from the Mahabharata. Time, according to the great Sanskrit epic, was immense, a wheel that rotated through cycles of creation (sarga) and destruction (pralaya), the birth and death of entire ages and worlds measured in aeons.
As a child – when an afternoon could contain an immensity of exploration – time felt infinite. Yet, after just a few years in the workplace, I had adapted to the adult world, where time is scarce, measured in unforgiving hours and minutes. To be grown-up is to race against the clock, to believe that you are in danger of either wasting or running out of time.
