Movies are for entertainment. One goes to a theatre, munches popcorn and washes it down with a steaming cup of extra sweet coffee, laughs or cries as dictated by the story line–some times it could be for all the wrong reasons if the quality of performance so warrants and forget all about it as one walks away and gets reabsorbed into the daily routine of life. So I thought, until we saw Lagaan, not six months ago, my daughter Madhuri having seen it earlier as a young girl in the year 2001 and I for the first time. This movie – it wouldn’t let us exorcise it from our thoughts. It remained embedded in the depths, haunting us benignly, for weeks, for months... perhaps for all lifetime! That is when we decided that we should pay a tribute to something that affected us so profoundly. An event can affect different people in different ways. We thought the best form of tribute would be to write about the way we understood it. In our perception, the movie said so many things that were unsaid, portrayed so much more about the characters than what the script and visualization individually did, had a content that was a great deal more than what a three-hour movie could enfold. The outcome of that resolve is this book titled “A surge of time.” We hope that this effort does justice to the episode of excellence called “Lagaan” and induces those who have not seen it yet, to do so and those who have, to view it many times more.