I woke up this morning to the metallic clang of a coconut falling on a tin roof somewhere nearby. That oddly comforting chaos is pure Kochi—a city where ancient rhythms thrum beneath digital lives. As I sipped my first chai from Ambili Chechi’s stall, watching the slow swirl of steam rise and vanish, a thought began to form: What exactly am I watching disappear? Time? Or just heat escaping?
This question, like a mosquito in monsoon, refused to leave me alone. So I decided to walk—with no agenda, just an open mind and a stubborn itch to figure out this strange entity we call “time.”
A Meandering Beginning
Time. We wear it on our wrists, blame it for our stress, and beg it to slow down when we’re happy. But what is it really? Is it an arrow flying relentlessly forward? A spiral looping in elegant curves? Or is it something we made up because our brains can’t handle entropy?
As I walked past MG Road, the local kids were already flying paper kites like technicolor thoughts flitting across the afternoon sky. They weren’t worried about deadlines or decaying atoms—they were just in the moment. And maybe, I thought, that’s where time hides—not in ticking clocks but in how we feel things unfold.
The Physics of Time (And a Dosa)
By the time I reached the dosa kadai near Fort Kochi, my mind had caught up with Einstein. Time, according to relativity, isn’t a universal tick-tock. It stretches and compresses depending on speed and gravity. In fact, GPS satellites orbiting Earth have to correct their clocks constantly because time ticks differently up there than down here.
Let that sink in: if you live on the 30th floor of a building, time moves a teeny bit faster for you than for someone on the ground floor. It’s like everyone’s living in slightly different timelines—even if we’re eating the same dosa.
But here’s the thing. If time isn’t constant, then whose time is real? Mine? Yours? The dosa’s?
The Problem with Arrows
Physicists like to talk about the arrow of time—that it always moves forward. You drop a plate, it shatters. It doesn’t unshatter. But why? The fundamental laws of physics don’t require time to move in just one direction. At the quantum level, things are reversible. So why isn’t our daily life?
The answer may lie in entropy—that delicious word that basically means “things get messier.” The universe tends toward disorder, and that’s what gives us our sense of “before” and “after.” It’s not time that flows, but change—irreversible change.
And yet… while eating my dosa, I couldn’t help but think: Is time just a trick of memory?
Sukumar and the Fish That Got Away
Around 2 p.m., I bumped into Sukumar at the jetty. He had his net slung over one shoulder and was arguing with a foreign tourist about fish being smarter than most humans.
“Time?” he scoffed when I posed the question. “Some days the net’s full. Some days it’s empty. But I throw it in all the same.”
I smiled. Sukumar’s philosophy, like quantum mechanics, doesn’t pretend to know everything. It embraces the unknown. His daily rhythm is dictated not by the clock, but by the tide—a force more primal than any mechanical hour.
Memories and the Mind’s Clock
As I wandered into Mattancherry, the air heavy with the scent of masala and history, I thought about how memory messes with time. A single hour of heartbreak can feel like an eternity. A joyful weekend vanishes in a blink. So does time move differently inside our heads?
Neuroscientists say yes. Our brain perceives time based on novelty. The more new things we experience, the longer the moment feels. That’s why childhood summers felt endless—they were packed with firsts. As we grow older, routine compresses our perception. Days become indistinguishable.
Time isn’t one thing—it’s many masks we wear to make sense of experience.
Maybe that’s why travel feels like time travel—it slows the internal clock.
Rakesh and the Simulation Theory
Later that evening, I found Rakesh (as always) at the tea stall, laptop open but untouched.
“If time feels different depending on perception,” he said, “maybe it’s not real. Maybe we’re just reading frames in a simulation engine.”
He wasn’t joking. Simulation theory posits that our reality is rendered like a video game, frame by frame, moment by moment. Time is just the rate at which frames are displayed.
“Simulation or not,” I replied, “this chai tastes real enough.”
Venuettan’s Taxi of Thought
To end the day, I took an auto with Venuettan, whose dashboard was as chaotic as the universe—coconut shells, old cassettes, and a bobblehead of Rajinikanth nodding at each bump.
“Young people always asking about time,” he laughed. “I say, just reach the station before the train leaves.”
Simple. Profound. Practical. Time, in his eyes, was just a schedule to catch, not a riddle to untangle.
What Is Time, Then?
As I walked back home under the orange-pink haze of a Kochi sunset, I realized something.
Maybe time isn’t a line or a loop or even a thing. Maybe it’s a language—one we use to make sense of cause and effect, of what changed and what didn’t. Maybe it’s a mirror we hold up to our own motion—physical, emotional, cosmic.
We invented hours and minutes, but the universe doesn’t tick. It pulses, expands, decays, and births. Time is our way of tagging events, of remembering.
Final Thought (or the Beginning Again)
So what is time?
A falling coconut. A swirl of steam. A kite in the sky. A dosa disappearing from a banana leaf. A net cast into unknowable waters. A chai shared with a friend.
Time is the story we tell ourselves about change—and how we choose to witness it.
And tomorrow, I’ll probably forget half of this and start over again. But that too… is time.
🧭 Related Reading
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