The Hindu Business Line : <I>Five minutes of freedom! </I>

Bound by routine? Has it become `the source of alienation'? Try this cure: `The Time Seller,' by Fernando Trías de Bes, from Wiley (www.wiley.com) . A business satire, an acerbic commentary, a funny meditation on time and work, as the dust jacket variously says.

The `deceptively simple story' is a reminder, one learns, that `the system should take from the individual only the time that is fair and absolutely necessary, and it should, in turn, provide him or her with the means to express love, humanity, spirituality, cooperation, solidarity, and help for others'.

To save the readers' time, the author abbreviates time to T; and T is $, he says to mean time is gold. Meet AG or the average guy in C1, that is, chapter 1. He works in the accounting department of IBN, or International Business Nonsense, `a decentralised, globalised multinational'.

It was when AG drew up his own A&L (assets and liabilities, as in a balance sheet), `one sleepless night', that `he realised just how screwed up his life had turned out: stuck up that dead-end street like all of us AGs of this world, or, to be more exact, snared in the big trap that humankind has laid for itself.'

On the assets side of the A&L were apartment, car, furniture, parking space, and a few thousand dollars in the bank and under the mattress. And the L side had a single line, `thirty-five years' - the time it would take for AG to pay up what he owed to the bank. `A mortgage on life,' discovered AG. He had sold his entire stock of T, narrates de Bes. AG was, in fact, a T seller, just like so many other AGs. On the contrary, the system that he was part of had all his time on the A side, while on the L side, it owed AG nothing.

He quits IBN and starts Freedom Inc., a business to sell `vials of five minutes,' a product that everybody should want, to regain control over lives by buying T back! He succeeds in patenting his idea for sale `to the good citizens of the Unnamed Settled Area.' To price it so that the AG can afford it, he calculates his earnings for five minutes at his ex job, as accountant. "When he saw the figure, he was stunned: had he known before, he wouldn't have waited so long to quit his job."

Well, to cut the long story short, to save T, AG packs 1,500 `Five minutes of freedom' and vends the vials with a slogan: `Hurry up, T's running out'. Soon enough, his product is on the Ns - that is, news!

Merits quality time for a quick read.

http://BookPeek.blogspot.com

D. Murali