Aane waala pal, jaane waala
hai,
Ho sake toh ismein, zindagi
bita doh,
Pal joh yeh jaane waala hai
(The moment that is coming, is about to go,
If possible, live your life in it,
The moment will pass anyway)
I always feel a wave of
nostalgia when I listen to this lovely Hindi song. It makes you think about the
fleetingness of time ever so poignantly…makes you want to stop time in its
tracks…but then you realise that you
can’t….and time is flying anyway…all you can do is to live it to the fullest.
The funny thing that happened
when this song was playing in the background while I was washing dishes a few
days ago (yes, that’s my time for listening to music!), is that I felt like I
actually registered the third verse for the first time (though I have listened
to this song gadzillion times)…. It goes like this:
Ek baar waqt se, lamha gira
kahin,
Wahaan daastan mili, lamha
kahin nahin.
(Once a moment fell from time,
There I found a story, the moment was nowhere to be
found)
I have been reading a lot
about ‘time’ from a sociological/philosophical perspective these days. I never
really thought about ‘time’ in a theoretical sense before or the fact that what
we refer to as time in terms of clock time or calendar time is simply a human construction
of time. In reality there is no such thing as ‘time’ at all… what we have is just
fragmented recollection or memories of events. Which is why we remember a lot
of things not so much by the day or year they took place but in connection with
other events or other things that we remember. And even past/present/future are
not three separate buckets…like this song so beautifully puts it… the moment
that is coming (which is future) will become present and the moment that is
present will become past almost instantaneously… Also it captures the
theoretical concept of ‘time’ so well when it says that a moment once gone
cannot be found as a moment at all… but in its place may be a story or event to
serve as a reminder of its existence…
It seems to me that all good
art is born out of a deeper or philosophical engagement with ideas… no wonder
then that even these simple phrases have such depth of meaning and insight…
