'How long are you planning to stay?'- 'another papad?'
Time and tide wait for no man. But boy, is there a tide in the affairs of some men who wait to know every aspect of your time. 'How long are you planning to stay?' has to be in the same league of pointless questions as 'How does the defendant plead?' and 'Bhaiyya, these veggies are fresh, right?' It has the additional virtue of being downright rude.
There is a certain candour, even chutzpah, when someone — usually an elderly relative, or a friend of the same age-group — asks things like 'How much is your 'take home'?' or 'What rent do you pay for this place?' I have fobbed off these Buland Darwaza-prying inquiries from non-Enforcement Directorate folks by either shrugging and ho-humming back with 'Oh, it's okay', or 'Some more papad, uncle?' But when faced with those persistent questions about one's itinerary and schedule, the ripostes trip less thick and fast off one's tongue.
'Spacetime' questions outside astrophysics are fundamentally conversation fillers, literally time-pass queries, like talking about the weather (unless you were in Dubai, or went out to vote last week). It also uses time — or, more accurately, temporality — as a crutch to hobble along a tete-a-tete that, unbeknown to the intrusive questioner, is as offensive as the Viet Cong's Tet one. As far as social etiquette goes, 'How long will you be there?' is on a par with asking a lady not just her age, but how long it is till she hits menopause.
This obsession with granular time, outside the realm of practicalities — a visit to the dentist, for
