Ab Bahut Ho Gaya. Ghar Chalein?

People get amused when I tell them I'm homesick after just 3 months of being in France. They are tickled pink when I tell them that I've started counting down to my last day in Grenoble - four weeks away. How do I explain to them how difficult it is not having any friends in the city and being so utterly alone at the end of the day? It's the feeling of being on the outside and looking in - almost like someone standing at the window, looking into a house filled with people laughing enjoying. Get the sentiment? That's how I feel - everytime I look out of my window I see similar windows but inside I usually see more than 1 person. On the 1st floor there's a couple waltzing - it's like a scene from a movie! On the 2nd floor directly above this couple, was another couple kissing passionately till they disappeared. I'm assuming they fell on the bed...there's a party on the 3rd floor. On the 4th floor somebody is playing a guitar and there are 2 girls perched on the window...today all day there was a group of people near the swimming pool with a barbeque set-up. They started their barbeque party at noon and they are still there at nearly 21h30...

And I'm sitting cross-legged on the chair all by myself with my dinner in my hand, staring out of the window and into their lives, like I have done almost every evening since I arrived, till I decide to pull the curtain and shut myself in my own world with my laptop, my assignments and virtual conversations for company.

I don't like being on the outside. I don't like cooking and eating by myself every day. I don't like being alone. And most of all I don't like feeling like my life is stuck in a limbo.

I want to go back home.

And you thought the passage of time had nothing to do with religion...

On a recent trip to Conflans, a charming medieval town close to Albertville (which hosted the Winter Olympic games in 1992) I found myself rivetted to this clock. On first sight, there is nothing extra-ordinary about the clock. But if you observe carefully, you will notice something out of the ordinary in the Roman numbers as we know them, i.e. I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII so on and so forth...

The Roman number IV, here, is written as IIII. My curiosity piqued, I set off to get a reasonable explanation, because this could obviously not be a human error. This is what I discovered :

Clocks first started appearing on the walls of churches and thus, the 12 hours marked on the clock were to represent the Trinity, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, each getting equal importance. If you divide the digits above into 3 groups you get I,II,III / IV,V,VI,VII,VIII / IX,X,XI,XII. Notice how the 2nd group has more digits, thus more importance, i.e. the son gets the maximum importance. Unacceptable, so the church modified the Roman number IV to be written as IIII so each one of the Trinity got equal importance!

Apparently most clocks in medieval towns / churches have this unique characterisitic. Fascinating piece of cultural / historical trivia isn't it?