At exactly 6:45pm, Shalini Banerjee’s phone buzzed with a familiar message: “On the way, stuck in traffic.” She looked around the table, still the only person seated at her own birthday dinner, and sighed. Her guests had been invited for 6:30 — which, in Indian social arithmetic, usually means 7:15, possibly 7:45, or never.
This wasn’t the first time Shalini, a Mumbai-based architect educated in the UK, had run into the phenomenon Indians often joke about but seldom dissect: our national allergy to punctuality.
Welcome to Indian Stretchable Time (IST)—a cultural chronotype, a social ritual, and arguably, a philosophical stance masquerading as a logistical failure.
A Nation Not in a Hurry
India, it seems, has mastered the art of temporal elasticity. From wedding baraats that begin post-midnight to political rallies where leaders show up hours later than advertised, time is not a schedule—it’s a suggestion. One might call it chaos. Others insist it’s tradition.
“Time in India is relational,” says Prof Sunil Deshpande, a cultural anthropologist at JNU. “We don’t see punctuality as a virtue but as rigidity. Arriving late, especially if you’re important–signals power. You’re worth waiting for.”
Echoed Prof Pooja V Anand, Department of Psychology, Daulat Ram College: “People need to feel valued and respected by themselves and by others. In many cultures, arriving late signifies that one is busy, which is again associated with being important. Also, when one arrives late, they often get maximum attention. One who arrives early is often understood as an easily available person, hence not so valued. Over time, these behaviours become culturally sanctioned and followed by most.”
This is nowhere more evident than in government offices. Try getting a senior bureaucrat to meet you at 11am sharp, and you may wait till lunch, or end up rebooking. In villages and small towns, bus schedules exist more as artwork than commitment. Even sacred rituals follow the muhurta — but often veer off it.
Ironically, the very phrase ‘time is money’ falls flat in a country where delays are endemic but rarely punished. Airlines announce hour-long delays with robotic indifference. Banks make you queue for services that could be digital. And train stations—once the epitome of British punctuality—now run on their own metaphysical clock.
Colonial Clocks, Postcolonial Rhythms
The British left behind many things—tea, trains, and timetables. But their clockwork worldview never quite fit the rhythms of a civilisation built on karma, not calendar.
In pre-colonial India, time was cosmic, not mechanical. It moved in cycles, not linear minutes. Festivals followed lunar rhythms. Marketplaces began at sunrise and shut when the sun dipped. There were no ‘appointments’—only encounters.
When the railways arrived, so did Greenwich Mean Time—with it, a foreign discipline of punctuality. Resistance to this imported rigidity was, in many ways, passive rebellion.
“Clock-time colonised our natural rhythms,” says Dr. Rukmini Dey, a historian of science. “But it never erased them. Instead, what we see today is a hybrid — we use clocks but interpret them culturally.”
The Class Clock
Punctuality in India is also a class privilege. The elite may claim to value time but often weaponise lateness as a form of soft domination. Arriving late at a wedding isn’t bad manners—it’s fashionably strategic. Politicians never show up early; they wait to be welcomed. CEOs saunter into board meetings once the juniors have been made to wait.
For the working class, however, time is brutal. A late punch at the factory gate means a docked day’s pay. A delayed cab arrival for a food delivery agent could trigger a low rating. The same society that laughs off a late minister will penalise the poor for being two minutes behind.
In that sense, Indian time is hierarchical—loose for the privileged, tight for the expendable.
The Pandemic Pause
Interestingly, the covid pandemic briefly recalibrated the country’s clocks. Work-from-home culture forced time discipline. Zoom meetings could not be fashionably late. Food deliveries became algorithmically punctual. For a moment, India synchronised with the world’s tighter timelines.
But the post-pandemic sprawl has brought a relapse. Office meetings have reverted to delays. Social gatherings remain as unclocked as ever. And nobody expects a contractor to complete a project on the promised date — “kal se shuru hoga” (we start tomorrow) remains the eternal mantra.
A Cultural Rebellion or a Coping Mechanism?
So why does this persist? Is it rudeness? A subconscious rebellion against colonial norms? Or just poor infrastructure?
Some psychologists suggest it’s a way to cope with unpredictability. In a country where power supply can vanish without warning, roads flood with one monsoon–perhaps time is best treated as fluid. “In India, you don’t control time, you negotiate with it,” says sociologist Leena Tiwari.
And perhaps that’s the real story: our relationship with time is less about discipline and more about dance—a chaotic jugalbandi of delay and adjustment, of promises made and remade.
Time Will Tell
There’s no denying the cost of this culture—missed opportunities, global misalignments, and the psychological fatigue of uncertainty. But there’s also a certain poetry in it. A rhythm that reflects a civilisation less obsessed with minutes and more attuned to moments.
As Shalini’s guests finally trickled in—some two hours late — she raised a glass and laughed. “They say you can take an Indian out of India,” she smiled, “but you’ll never take the IST out of them.”
And perhaps, just perhaps, that’s our superpower—or our greatest flaw. Either way, the world will just have to wait.
(The author is an assistant professor of English at South Asian University, New Delhi. She is also an author and poet)
