Irving Finkel

This is how you play.

Because you can get the rules down in like three minutes like this.

So I said, okay, first you have to do this.

First you have to do that.

So off you go.

So there was silence.

And then after a while, someone said...

I hate you!

I'm never playing this game with you again!

When they'd never played it before, when somebody had escaped at the last minute, cleaned up just when they thought they were going to get... And it provokes that salutary, benevolent fury and rage in the players, which all good board games do.

And they were happily married couples who were, at the end of the afternoon, phoning their respective lawyers to discuss the future, that kind of thing.

I do.

I do, yes.

I think...

I mean, you can say that in communities you have rivalry, hostility, who's the best, who's the fastest, who's the strongest and things.

And if you play a board game like that, all the reality of it is sublimated into a safe terrain.

Yes, the safe terrain.

Where you can nevertheless get angry, but it's not like that.

That's one thing.

But more significantly, I believe, is the question of what in India people call time pass.