Jane Withers: Our sense of time has changed so much with the forced slowdown, and for many of us it has taken on new texture and meaning, but you have been considering this for a long time – how did this come about?
Anupama Kundoo: I think it goes back to very basic questions I asked myself when I was young. I grew up in India, which is an old civilization, but I was in Bombay where there was this flurry of things happening all the time. People looked busy, they were increasingly stressed, they were doing all kinds of things. But the city and built environment looked worse to me, year after year. This was my perception as a child. It felt like no matter what you did, you never saw the fruits of it.
The more I went into this question of time, I realized that people are so busy saving other resources like money, but they are ready to give up their personal time. I came to the essential question: What is the cost of saving time? Are we paying for it with environmental, social, economic disruptions? I realized more and more that time is all I had.