The Beauty of Silence

Very raw from the utmost depths of my nostalgia I managed to recollect a poem from the 3rd grade of schooling in Mumbai. It seldom made half sense to me while being a part of the curriculum during that year. Though Figures of Speech came much later in the schooling syllabus that poem was my first brush with Antithesis. Not many of my contemporaries may remember the poem called “The Town Child and The Country Child”. The poem had two different perspectives, one from the boy who lived in the modern-day city and the other from a rural terrain. Both had distinct and ironic views for sound. It reminds me during those years, poems for us kids were just a mere literary material to study and forget, and rarely did we try to relate it to life. For me, discussing this poem out of the blue for a simple reason is experiencing the very experience of what it says.

The poem beautifully balanced two conflicting ideas towards noise - the love of the town child towards the calming silence of countryside and the attraction for the city noise of the latter. However as philosophical by birth I was, the town child did relate to me in some immature sense, though I never felt that I’d live to ponder on those two facets of noise and here I am. Living in Mumbai comes with all types of cliched stereotypical experiences and one of it, is the never ending commotion of the town side. I remember how living in the typical Mohalla can haunt you with high pitched decibels. One second you can hear, Saas-bahu catfights in loud noise, and on another the pathetically trite sound of some news channels, kids playing in the lane, hawkers honking for daily bread and vehicles struggling to make way through. What a pity for ears especially if one isn’t a selective listener.

Circa 2006, I landed in the city of Liverpool, epoch away in time and distance from the noise of the city, the fast life and of course the deadly combo of soap operas and the Indian media. Never did I enjoy a place and time in life like I did for my year in the University – a cosy dorm-room for perfect solace and the silence that mesmerised me to no end. The first few weeks were numb, for not being familiar with dead silence. My comrades did reflect the horror the absence of commotion brought to them. After all living in Mumbai makes you immune to especially honking and other unwanted sounds, which also speaks about being habituated too.

Though England has its charm in beautiful locales, what I like about this place is the silence that you can experience during nights. Living in still-life is one of the boons here that I admire. Music and sound makes living a lively affair, but there are times to turn off the music, because silence is what one needs to breathe, to uncoil, to return to a state of balance and hear the quiet soliloquy of your own heart. Ever wondered what profound relief a few minutes of silence can bring to oneself, am sure everyone of us have experienced it at some point in life irrespective of the conscious thought.

In my opinion, in silence one can truly nurture emotional intelligence. Not only emotional rather subconscious intelligence. Often if you we assess, unwanted sounds are nothing less than a physical assault, it shrinks some part of our attention span and therefore restrict the experience of processing meaningful information. It is like working with deep concentration on some office project at one point when the sudden sound of a ringtone voicing the latest number makes you think of the actors in the movie, the jarring costumes they wore and the slapstick moves they did to qualify it as a dance of romance – Aaargh!!! See, where did you started as, what were you thinking and where did you land – all simply because of sound.

It is only when we find a morsel of conscious silence, we realise how deviating is the onslaught of the sounds we haven’t chosen to hear. But irrespective of our choice it still manages to divert our thought process. You may find silence in an empty room. There is silence in some places of worship, work of arts, in depths of paintings, in the bark of trees. And most of all within us when we shut eyes and stop thinking of anything that bothers.

And for once I say, choose a place where you think you find peace, close your eyes, shut the world around. Sit or lie comfortably, breathe gently and tune in to that inner-self – have a soliloquy with your heart and REJUVENATE...