"We have agreed to divide the day into twenty-four hours. It is very arbitrary – because the earth moves one complete circle on its axis in twenty-four hours, so we have decided to divide it into twenty-four. Then we have decided to divide each hour into sixty minutes.

"There is no intrinsic necessity to divide it that way. Some other civilization may divide it in a different way. We can divide the hour into a hundred minutes and nobody is going to prevent us. Then each minute we have divided into sixty seconds. That too is arbitrary, just utilitarian. It is clock time. It is needed; otherwise society will fall apart.

"Something as a common standard is a necessity – just like money, currency money. A hundred-rupee note, a ten-dollar bill, or anything else – it is just a common belief the society has agreed to use it. But it has nothing to do with existence. If man disappears from the earth, the pound sterling, the dollar, rupees will all disappear immediately. The earth will be without money immediately without man. Rocks will be there, flowers will still flower, the spring will come and birds will sing, and in the fall old leaves will fall; but there will be no money. Even if there are piles of money on the roads, it will not be money at all. Because to call it money a man is needed. To respect it as money a man is needed.

"The government goes on promising, on each note the promise is written: The Finance Governor promises to pay you ten rupees worth of gold if you produce this note to the bank. It is just a promise. When there is nobody to promise, the currency disappears.

"When man is not there on the earth, clocks may go on chiming time, but it will not be time at all. Nobody will bother, nobody will look at them. Clock time will stop immediately if man is not there; so it is man-created, a social by-product.

"The higher a society moves – and when I say 'higher' I mean the more complex it becomes – the more and more it becomes obsessed with chronological time."