While growing up we’d been made conscious of it all the time – it’s ‘time’ to get up, leave for school, it’s ‘study-time’, ‘meal-time’, play-time and ‘time’ to rest and so on and of course there’s no ‘time’ to waste for despite being invisible ‘time’ has much value. We learnt the phrase ‘Time and tide waits for no one’ and the veritable man-made ‘Clocks’ symbolize the passage of time and the cycles of life, and have deep cultural and symbolic significance across history, art and religion.
We’ve also read that ‘Clocks’ have been used for centuries to measure time, even before devices like sundials and water clocks were invented. The modern generation has the latest in tech-gadgets but probably missed what we had in the 1960-70s – from ‘Cuckoo’ clocks that announced the hour with a cuckoo bird call to majestically tall, freestanding pendulum ‘Grand-father’ clocks with an elaborate design to the smaller ‘Mantel’ clocks that sat on a mantelpiece, shelf or table. There were others like smaller ‘time-pieces’ too.
It’s the hangover of our family heritage & parental legacy, that we have a clock in every room apart from the customary wrist-watches and cell-phones that every one possesses. But interestingly all three clocks show different times that are about ten minutes apart. After due thought, we’ve decided not to align all of them to the minute and let them be. Symbolically, if we individuals can be so different from each other despite having similar backgrounds, the clocks having their distinct origins must be allowed their space & time.
The quaint ‘Cuckoo’ clock was bought by us from a shop in Switzerland in 2013 and in keeping with its advanced origins it runs faster than all the others. The second one was a gift from a friend- it works fairly accurately, uncannily like the givers. The third one was actually a complimentary item along with a financial product. That one is the slowest. Finally we have a dainty ‘mantel’ clock that has slots for putting pictures on three sides and is the one we most love. It carries some of our grand-daughter’s earliest photos !
One realizes that today, modern interior designers don’t encourage putting up clocks that might give a period look to bold, exotic layouts. Some people, however, preserve the old clocks and antiques of their parental homes as family heirlooms. We’d fall in that category. We could restore a more than a century old ‘grandfather’ clock with the help of our ‘Uncle’ who was a genius with his hands. It stands tall in my younger Sister, Kalyani Bose’s home in Indiana, USA under her kind care !
Working on Living 