origin
the game of ‘gyanja’ (persian word for ‘treasure’) was a popular pastime in the 16th and 17th century (possibly even earlier) in northern India. the game was played on an 8×8 grid (much like a chess board). players moved in an anti-clockwise direction starting from the cell on the top right corner of the board, and spiraled inwards, ending in the center cell (cell #61), which was also called ‘gyanja’ or ‘treasure’. the players played this game with stakes, and whoever landed directly on the last cell, could lay claim to the stake that had collected in it during the game play.
time
our modern understanding of time is very complex. fundamentally we believe time is linear and relatively divided between the past, present and future. the understanding of ‘present’ depends upon the context. it could span from the “moment” to “decades” to even a centuries. we also believe that time is interpreted in relation to the ‘speed of light’ which is constant. yet, we experience that time is cyclical and repeats itself in patterns of a year, generations of people and even in the rise and fall of civilizations, which may be seen in cycles of several decades or centuries. At the same time, modern science attempts to deal with ‘time drifts’ resulting from “relativistic time dilation because of orbiting satellites”; atomic clocks are reset due to “chaotic rate changes in the spin of the earth”; thermodynamically, “time” is synonymous with “entropy” (disorder) as the universe expands and cools at cosmological scales; at quantum scales, however, any understanding of “time” is completely lost, as time can appear to “go backwards”, or events can appear to occur in two different locations at “the same time” .
