It was a warm summer evening in the township of Manipal; a small township in Karnataka, South India. It was where I studied for my undergraduate degree in engineering at MIT, Manipal(India’s MIT). We had just begun our explorations into the unknown & I had my part-time job DJing at the most happening pub in the township. This was no ordinary job. It was the coolest thing to do as a student in that township; it was a way of life for all those college nights, now thinking back. I was hand-picked by the previous DJ of the pub, a final-year college senior named Aatman who was leaving after graduating. He put in a word to the owner to hire me to guide the sonic systems so all the pub-goers could soar. This was based on conversations & interactions I had with him & sharing music on our iPods back in those days. After a few trial runs & the owner seeing the crowd being very receptive to my setlists each night I was hired permanently. I remember walking into the pub for the first time in my freshman year. I saw Aatman on the PC soundsystem DJing at the pub & thought to myself “I want that, I want that job”. A year later it happened. Those were formative years and it’s fundamentally shaped my life & my career as a musician since. Back to that evening. It was our second year of college & my roommates and I lived in a rented-out duplex penthouse apartment with a terrace. Coincidentally, our apartment complex was right next door to the pub. So I’d stagger my way to the pub via a narrow opening through a path that ran through a construction site just in front of our apartment complex. But that evening, we gathered on the terrace & I plugged in my iPod to the 5.1 sound system. My roommates wanted to listen to Pink Floyd and smoke a few joints. I had ripped all the mp3s from the pub’s computer to my iPod and laptop. And we were just discovering Pink Floyd. Ah, what a time. I remember that evening clearly. It was the first time I’d heard Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon album as the tracks played one after another. We went into drifting daydreams and our own little reveries as the pot took its effect. The song that stood out for me was ‘Time’ with its eerie intro of ticking clocks and atmospheres and a mishmash of jangling bells as it progresses with a ticking sound along with Roger Waters’ bassline roving in and out while Richard Wright adds the fillers on the keyboard. The intro sounded especially trippy on the pot. The intro lasts about two minutes & we all zoned out as the music played through the 5.1 channel sub-system my roommate had bought for our room & the terrace. That’s when I heard David Gilmour’s voice sing the first verse: Ticking away the moments that make up the dull day I was awestruck & in a contemplative headspace, but the most compelling lines came immediately after: Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time. I used to play “Time” at the pub pretty frequently as well. It was all about that trippy intro. But the more I heard the song, especially when I heard David Gilmour and Roger Waters’ lyrics “And then one day you find ten years have got behind you. No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun” I’d think to myself, what a load of rubbish. Ten years is such a long time. A decade! I’d only been born for nearly two at the time. I was 19 at the time. I used to keep thinking to myself why would Waters and Gilmour write that? Ten years! Ten f*cking years is equivalent to aeons. We were only midway through college, and those four years took forever & went slow & easy. So at the time, I kept thinking what a bunch of hogwash it was that they wrote a song that suggests ten years a short time. But when I hit thirty those lines from the song hit me hard. Now in my thirties, whenever I hear the song and those lines… I get it. It truly was exactly like Gilmour & Waters said it was. And then one day you find ten years have got behind you It hit me, that the past ten or fifteen years since I graduated have flown by. Time is so fleeting. A lifetime is even more fleeting and the older you grow the more you realise it. Time is the most valuable resource we have but we squander it away. Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time Time truly flies. It’s exactly like Pink Floyd foretold. I was just too young and naive to see it or comprehend it at that particular time. Life is so short. So it’s up to us to not only strive to make our bank balances richer, but our days richer. Although that & Pink Floyd’s “Money” (also from Dark Side of the Moon) is for another post. Time can’t just be traded in for a paycheck. Time is all we have. We often don’t realise how we squander our time. But when it truly hits you and sinks in you’ll start to spend your time much more wisely and surrounded by the ones you love, spending quality time with them. In the end, it’s the quality of our days that make our lifetime. A message that Pink Floyd managed to put across in a song in the 1970s. So if you’re still young & in your twenties or teens, you won’t get it right away but you will one day. All we have in the end is time management; that’s all life is — time management. It’s not about productivity or cranking in work hours, it’s about living meaningfully. I have a book about to be released in the coming weeks, wherein I touch upon this & explore several philosophical, existential & other viewpoints in 45 Thought-Provoking Perspectives. If you follow me on my newsletters, I’ll be sharing a post about it soon. It’s called “Make Your Own Waves” and I do hope you read my upcoming post about its release and buy a copy.
Thanks for your “Time” :) Thank you for being a valuable subscriber to my newsletter Light Years! If you liked this post & found it informative, feel free to share this publication with your network by clicking the button below… I hope you found this post informative & it helped you in some way. As always, feel free to subscribe to my publication Light Years & support it & also share it if you’d like. Get it in your inbox by filling up the space below! Thank you for reading, if you enjoyed this article & would like to read more similar kinds of articles, consider subscribing to my Medium. Gaurav Krishnan - Medium You're currently a free subscriber to Light Years by Gaurav Krishnan. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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Thursday, 22 May 2025
The Pink Floyd Song That Hits The Hardest
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