There used to be an interesting email floating around in the internet circles emphasizing the importance of time by placing its value in different circumstances - To understand the value of one year: Ask a student who has failed a final exam, to understand the value of one month: Ask a mother who has given birth to a premature baby....down to..to understand the value of one millisecond: Ask the person who has won a silver medal in the Olympics... and so it went. In each of those instances, time is built up as something that is very tangible - grab an hour here, use a minute there - even though the very notion of time is an intangible and quite an arbitrary one. 'Time heals everything' goes another oft-quoted assuaging saying, as though it is the time, and not the memory, that has those medicinal powers (On the other hand, 'In the end, memory will erase out everything' doesn't make up much for reassurance or hope). Most of the sayings, quotes that involve time talk about masking the pain. Time and Pain have a very inter-dependent relationship. While passing through agony, time seems to be standstill, and once the ordeal is over, time rushes in and covers up all the evidence, as though over-compensating for the moments that it couldn't be there, leaving behind only a faint etch in the memory of the painful past. 'Recollecting the times', 'reliving the moments' should in fact be 'reliving the experiences' or 'recollecting the events'. And even those experiences and events undergo exaggerations and embellishments over a period of time, making 'time' a credible witness only in the present. So, what does 'time' mean? Ask pain.

'127 Hours' is a real time examination of what the tick of each second means to the psyche, particularly when caught in a precarious situation. How does the mind process it when death brushes past life, like in the case of a speeding auto that misses collision by a whisker? Simple answer, it cannot. It is not the magnitude of danger that overpowers the senses, but the rapid elapse of time that the mind cannot piece together to make something out of the near tragedy. On the other hand, how about if the tragic event is protracted over a substantial period of time? How does the mind compute caught in a situation, where death is a likely outcome and the passing of every second is quite palpable? People caught in natural calamities (floods, tornadoes) or man made disasters (riots, pogroms, massacres) can still account for (and relive) every second of their trepidation, even much later in their lives. When there is no end in sight, when the idea of death appears lot more humane than the grind of the unbearable reality, would the mind still stick with its natural instinct to survive at any cost? The answer varies in every situation, and even more, with every person, and like in psychology no answer is right and no choice is wrong. Based on a true story, '127 Hours' is about a mountain climber trapped in a narrow crevice in a deep canyon with his arm pinned against a rock by a huge boulder with nary a soul in sight and dwindling reserves to contend with. It all comes down to (Sophie's) choices when the question is reduced to the simple matter of life and death.

What would one choose to keep and let go under the crushing weight of passing time - resolve, strength, sanity or life itself? True stories as these (and countless out there) reveal what humans beings are capable of (in best and worst lights) to hang on to their lives, and their sanities. Another famous case of an Uruguayan football team crashing landing in the snow mountains of Andes (as depicted in a gut-wrenching manner in 'Alive') and trying to survive for over a couple of months in the midst of freezing temperatures, snow blizzards, not to mention, meager food and water (causing them to ultimately resort to cannibalism, eating only their dead friends, of course), calls into question the reasons the mind conjures up to justify its actions as needed for its existence. The Hobson's choice confronting the protagonist in '127 Hours' is as clear as it is unconscionable. Make that choice and it is termed as the 'triumph of the spirit' or the 'prevail of the will', in retrospect. But these phrases are mere after-thoughts, they are never the motivations behind the choice. The real reason remains, beating the clock, not allowing time to ahead in the race to live, as these survivors know, that in such circumstances, time is both the competition and companion in pain.

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