Kal: Where Yesterday Meets Tomorrow

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In Einstein’s space–time continuum, past and future exist within the same structure of time, rather than flowing separately


What would you say of a language, and its people, that uses the same word for yesterday and tomorrow?

In Hindi, that word is kal.

What a remarkable conception of time this is: moving away from the idea of a strictly linear passage of time to one where the past and the future converge in the present. Whether kal means tomorrow or yesterday becomes clear only through grammatical structure or from the context of the present moment.

Our senses tell us that time flows. We think of the past as having slipped out of existence, while the future remains even more shadowy, its details still unformed.

The “now” of our conscious awareness appears to glide steadily onward, transforming events that once belonged to the unformed future into the concrete but fleeting reality of the present—only for them to be quickly relegated to the fixed past.

Hidden within this lies a remarkable paradox.

Nothing in the physical, philosophical, or spiritual world truly corresponds to the passage of time as we perceive it. In fact, this perception is at odds with modern physics.

Albert Einstein famously expressed the point:

“The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

How then did our thinkers reconcile this apparent dichotomy between the passage of time as we experience it and its illusory nature?

Just as physicists came to the idea of a space–time continuum, our philosophers too imagined time as something akin to a landscape—a timescape, as it were—where past and future events exist together.

How beautifully, then, to express this idea by referring to both the past and the future with a single word: kal.

The word itself is closely related to kaal, the Sanskrit word for time.

Yet there are certain things that seem to freeze the passage of time. Though they belong to the past, they are relived again and again in the present.

One such example is “Time,” the iconic composition by Pink Floyd. It has become part of our shared cultural heritage.

How poignant that many people have asked for this song to be played at their funeral or in their final moments. Perhaps they sense that it does not speak of an ending, but of a journey continuing across a timeless landscape.

Perhaps this is what kal quietly reminds us: that yesterday and tomorrow are not so far apart on the landscape of time. Nothing captures the pathos of the passage of time better than these lines:

And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

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