Duration

Over the weekend, responding to a call from my friend, Gopal Bhargava, I was in Kanpur to conduct training for JCI Kanpur Industrial and also for the IMA, Ophthalmologists’ Society and students from seven schools. This Monday Muse is triggered by the experience of travelling to Lucknow airport to board my return flight scheduled to depart at 8am.

The organisers told me that it would take just 75 minutes to travel the distance from Kanpur to Lucknow. They suggested that even if I were to leave Kanpur by 6am I would reach by 7.15am. When I insisted that I wanted to leave at 5am, they told me they knew better. But I remained firm and eventually reached the airport by 7.30am... just in time to rush through the formalities!

Interestingly, they did not err in their estimated duration to cover the distance. So what went wrong? The taxi reported late. A brief stop for tea turned time consuming. All this delay was compounded by traffic that steadily increased after 6am. The vehicle and the driver were slow. The distance remained the same but the duration of the journey had doubled.

So often we presume that the duration to cover a particular distance is the same. We ignore that variables may occur in the start-off or the quality of the vehicle or the skill of the driver or the traffic on the road or delays on the way or even breakdowns! All this factors need to be considered while planning a new journey across the same distance that we may have travelled before.

Experience can condition our minds to look at things in a rash way. The journey will be better if we accept that duration is affected by changing variables in the attitude and approach of the traveller as well as external issues that surface on the way. Time depends on the journey, not on distance. The play ‘Zoo Story’ has a pertinent line: ‘you have to go a long way to cover a short distance’.

The same distance at different times will see duration differ
we must BE BETTER at visioning the variables that may occur…

- Pravin K. Sabnis

On Lucknow-Mumbai flight.