One of the most fascinating concepts I’ve ever come across is that of “trading time”. I first came across it in Benoit Mandelbrot’s The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets, which is possibly the only non-textbook and non-children’s book that I’ve read at least four times.
The concept of “trading time” is simple – if you look at activity on a market, it is not distributed evenly over time. There are times when nothing happens, and then there are times when “everything happens”. For example, 2020 has been an incredibly eventful year when it comes to world events. Not every year is eventful like this.
A year or so after I first read this book, I took a job where I had to look at intra-day trading in American equities markets. And I saw “trading time” happening in person – the volume of trade in the market was massive in the first and last hour, and the middle part of the day, unless there was some event happening, was rather quiet.
Trading time applies in a lot of other contexts as well. In some movies, a lot of action happens in certain times of the movie where nothing happens in other times. When I work, I end up doing a lot of work in some small windows, and nothing most of the time. Children have “growth spurts”, both physical and mental.
I was thinking about this topic when I was reading SL Bhyrappa’s Parva. Unfortunately I find it time-consuming to read more than a newspaper headline or signboard of Kannada, so I read it in translation.
However, the book is so good that I have resolved to read the original (how much ever time it takes) before the end of this year.
It is a sort of retelling of the Mahabharata, but it doesn’t tell the whole story in a linear manner. The book is structured largely around a set of monologues, largely set around journeys. So there is Bhima going into the forest to seek out his son Ghatotkacha to help him in the great war. Around the same time, Arjuna goes to Dwaraka. Just before the war begins, Bhishma goes out in search of Vyasa. Each of these journeys associated with extra long flashbacks, and philosophical musings.
In other words, what Bhyrappa does is to seek out tiny stories within the great epic, and then drill down massively into those stories. Some of these journey-monologues run into nearly a hundred pages (in translation). The rest of the story is largely glossed over or given only a passing mention to.
Bhyrappa basically gives “trading time treatment” to the Mahabharata. It helps that the overall story is rather well known, so readers can be expected to easily fill in any gaps. While the epic itself is great, there are parts where “a lot happens”, and parts where “nothing happens”. What is interesting about Parva is that Bhyrappa picks out unintuitive parts to explore in massive depth, and he simply glosses over the parts which most other retellings give a lot of footage to.
And this is what makes the story rather fascinating.
I can now think of retellings of books, or remakes of movies, where the story remains the same, but “trading time is inverted”. Activities that were originally given a lot of footage get glossed over, but those that were originally ignored get explored in depth.