Mysore is a hearitage city where many of us live by calender, not the clock. One of my early posts on this site pertained to our glaring indifference to punctuality. To read more...click on  'Why this contempt for the clock?'

GVK has made a pertinent point on the need for launching a civic crusade on punctuality on the Ecuador lines. Time management, I feel, is essentially mind management. We are given to all sorts of distractions because of which we lose sight of priorities. (I am attempting a book on this).

In the Indian context, the colossal abuse of time is an extension of our feudal past. In fact, we have never broken off from the past; it is a feudal present, as well. Consider this. A minister keeps thousands of people waiting not because his car had a mechanical breakdown but he is nursing a hangover. Then, when he is above to leave, his party functionaries call on him (needless to say, unannounced), and he wants to keep them in good humour because they are more needed. Half an hour is spent with them talking local politics. The functionaries are happy to have spent so much time with the big man. 'Brother has a wonderful personality, he has no airs about him.'

When Brother finally arrives two unbroken hours late at the venue of the function, he is greeted with applause, even a standing ovation. He does not even feel the need to apologize. If he has felt, he still does not say sorry because he thinks that the audience is unmindful of the delay and has expressed the same with its cheer. The audience, the bureaucracy, the police nobody feels anything about the insult, because there is no insult felt in the first place. The insult of their time being flagrantly encroahed upon.

The media is also becoming less and less critical of the netas for not respecting its time. Reporters spend sizeable time of their lives waiting for habitual time-violating politicians. Whether their patience goes unrewarded or not, particularly in these days when journalism is losing its characteristic stridency, is a moot question. However, even a couple of reporters that may refuse to entertain late-coming politicians cannot always do so because their editors don't approve of such dissidence either because of their own equations with the late-comers or out of an understandable anxiety that their publication might miss something important. (In either case, there is a commercial interest!)

GVK might want to throw light on this by sharing what he himself did, say, during his Delhi days when a bigwig came late to a function/press conference.

Late-coming is also a status symbol for many. The duration for which their audience has to wait for their arrival is in direct proportion to their position/self-importance.

There is so much to be written about this subject (hence the book idea). I will cut it short to say that time management has to do with disciplining oneself and starting to respect oneself (which automatically means respecting the man for whom one has given time). Finally, it has to do with achieving higher productivity and prosperity.