Timepass

One of my favourite Indian English words is timepass (I just googled and found 185,000 references to it).

"What are you doing?" "Nothing much, just timepass."

"So, what do you do for timepass?"

Our entire lives, most of us, could be summed up just that way; and, looked at in that larger sense, it acquires a kind of poetry.

riverrun. timepass. the end.

A few years ago a minor celebrity with a colourful life, Protima Bedi, published a memoir and called it Timepass. I admired her for that clear-sightedness. (The memoir was actually put together from a draft by her daughter after Bedi's sudden death: she went on pilgrimage to a shrine in the Himalayas. While she and her group were camped out for the night an avalanche came down and buried them. Her body was not found.)

Why did I write this post? You know it already, it's there in the title.