Waging our own time war
By Mohinder Singh

The spirit of the time shall teach me speed

Shakespeare’s King John

SPEED, in physics, is a function of distance over time: miles per hour, metres per second. More speed, less travel time. Yet what we yearn more often is the feeling of speed, not so much the actual speed. Flying at six hundred miles an hour in a commercial airliner hardly gives any feeling of speed, except for a slight pressing into one’s seat on takeoff, and at the fierce application of brakes and a reversal of engines on landing.

The experience of speed is a neurophysiological condition. It releases into our brain a cascade of naturally occurring chemicals such as the hormones of epinephrine and norepinephrine. This imparts a high, the sort a youngster feels on gathering speed cycling downhill. "Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man," writes Milan Kundera in his novel Slowness.

Right from ancient times well into the nineteenth century, the top velocity for anyone had stayed constant; the gallop of a horse. It was so with Alexander the Great and it was the same with Napoleon. Only in the last two centuries speeds have escalated. And now speed records of all types — on road, rails, water, air, and space (the astronauts of Apollo 10 achieving a speed of 24, 791 miles per hour) are being set and shattered. Often the most touted selling point in an upcoming car is the speed it can reach from zero in the fewest seconds.

Other machines are getting faster, too, with every upgrade. Machines not only go faster with each generation but also move from generation to generation at a brisker pace. Take personal computers. Their speed now doubles in eighteen months or less.

"Speed is the essence of war," said Sun Tzu, the famed Chinese writer on warfare. Throughout history battles have mostly gone in favour of the swifter side. War is now so fast, any city anywhere can be hit in seconds. Indeed its speed is such that human beings are getting displaced by computers. A human body, for instance, can tolerate no more than about seven g’s of acceleration, the sort of load shouldered by an F-16 pilot pushing his plane to the limit in a sharp climb or curve. Soon it could be pilotless planes delivering missiles, guided from the air or by someone sitting far away.

And we confront a world of instant and direct contact between every point on the globe. The world’s business takes place at the speed of light, the speed offered by the fibre-optic cable. A million transactions a minute now pulse through the New York Stock Exchange alone. The old-style trader shouting from the trading floor or talking into his headset is giving way to someone sitting before the small screen. The press of a key could send international markets into a tizzy or plunge a particular country into penury.

Images in TV ads, even in serials, are being flashed faster and faster. Sometimes they are flashed so fast they cross the threshold of perception, leaving just a sensory glimmer in the viewer’s brain. The producers of TV programmes make out that it’s the viewer who’s in a hurry. Any little let-up in action, and he starts switching channels on his remote. In fact some TV watchers these days entertain themselves by projecting in rapid succession bits of programmes from all available channels.

Speed, it seems, has become the ultimate luxury good. While you negotiate your way through traffic-jams and snarls, you see VIPs driven fast, their way cleared by sirens and armed escorts. And the very rich in New York or Tokyo move in helicopters that take off from tops of office buildings.

People like Kundera worry about the mounting seduction for speed: People hurrying on city streets, some even racing up or down moving escalators. He advocates resisting this hyperactive culture by engaging in activities, such as reading or gardening or ambling, that are perforce slower. Reading particularly implies time for reflection, a slowing down. "There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting," says he.

Children seem to grow faster these days. Fed on a daily diet of quick-moving TV ads and other components of the information age, these youngsters can "process" hundreds of images and millions of bits of information. Yet Kundera wonders whether this heightened ability to absorb bits of information has anything to do with thinking — with constructing or analyzing an argument, with making good decisions — much less knowledge in the strong sense. Indeed many of the youngsters are said to be suffer from attention-deficit syndrome. Teachers better give lessons at top speed or the attention of their wards wanders.

The question: What’s the big hurry? Where are we going with our high-speed chase? Whence this urge, this speed imperative? Is technology to blame?

Perhaps the motor of speed lies buried not in the engine or the microprocessor but within each one of us. We are forever dividing more and more space by less and less time, waging our own "time wars". But we cannot escape time.

Alas, time stays, we go. No matter how quickly you move, death drives the fastest car on the highway; it eventually overtakes everybody.