From The Guardian: Indian villager takes 14 years to dig tunnel through mountain.
An Indian villager burrowed for 14 years with a hammer and chisel to cut a tunnel through a mountain so that his neighbours could reach nearby fields and he could park his truck outside his home.
Ramchandra Das, 53, who lives in eastern Bihar state, carved a 10m-long, 4m-wide tunnel through the hill range from his village of Kewati. Das took up the Herculean task after villagers found the 7km trek over the mountain increasingly arduous.
When the authorities refused to help to cut the journey time, Das began carving his way through the earth in the direction of the nearest big town, Atri. The job became more pressing when Das became the first man to own a truck in the village and was unable to drive it to his home. [continue]
Different conceptualization of time.
I don’t know anybody who would undertake a task, any task, that would take more than a decade or two decades, except perhaps raising a child to adulthood, and most parents, I suspect, don’t think of the length of time of the commitment when they have a child. They think more in terms of number of years till the child is in school (and therefore someone else’s responsibility for the better part of its waking hours).
I was put in mind of the history I’ve read about the long campaigns undertaken by Roman soldiers. Campaigns in terms of many years, signing up for a 20 year hitch (compare to our two years or less).
And for both Romans and Indians, set the time scale of a normal life span of 40 or 50 years…imagine commiting half or a third of your life, certainly half of your adult years, to such a project.
And we cavil at an extra 30 minutes added to our commute to work….