A dedication to this post is the song whole world loves –
This list isn’t exhaustive and will never be. I can’t see my future and won’t imagine it too, for vivid dreams have a way of becoming stumbling blocks for happiness. But here are somethings that I want to do, to get my head straight –
1. Grab my first chance at a solitary holiday for a month or so. I need my time doing nothing, no contacts, no family, no communication, no gadgets. Just food, water, me and may be some strangers who deal in nothing but love.
2. I want to go soundless once. Listen to absolutely no sound, so I can listen to myself, for I want to clear the noises in my head, that have become quite a puzzle to solve over time.
3. This one is explicit and can’t be revealed here. (Thinking sex? Bingo!)
Silence eh! It has made its presence felt in my life in many very different ways. Let me take you through some of them and why it is so special to me.
When I was growing up, when my parents took all the decisions in my life, I remember my brother and I once getting enrolled for a christian camp in St. Theresa School. I was in 8th standard, too young to understand what was going on inside and outside my head. We had no friends there and we were all we had. If I remember correctly it was a 3 days camp. I don’t remember the routine too. I just remember few moments very clearly in my head. We were all sleeping by our ages in different classes and I happened to wake up very early on the first morning. Now I’m not talking about a city with a lot of hustle and bustle but a very coy town of Bhopal in 1997. It was so quiet, so so quiet that I could feel my heart beating. I looked outside the window into the deep green forest behind the school and went outside to the balcony and nothing but leaves had gathered enough energy to move. It was the start of the winter for us and temperature was starting to dip. That silence and I saw my brother sleep. I felt love, lots of it. He needed me so much. I still feel that depth inside. I’ve been ever since trying to emulate that feeling but have failed, although I have come close to it. But that was one morning I’ll never forget. There was another in an evening right at the twilight. As I stood in the balcony and looked left from above the market into the horizon, a strange calmness prevailed inside me. I still remember the other boys making a total ruckus inside the classroom behind my back but it couldn’t bother me then. I was lost. I was new.
I was lost when I was travelling alone for the first time to my college in a train. I still remember the Walkman and a few of the songs and their albums. I have travelled so much during and after my engineering years that I’ve lost track of the exact time and the song but yes I definitely remember if it was raining during some of them. Since, it wasn’t exactly the digital age that we revel in now, I had to carry a lot of cassettes in my bag pack and some of those albums were trance. If anyone remembers it, there was a series of trance collection remixed and redone by Sony Music that went by the name – A Trip Of Trance. They came out in volumes 1 to 6 till I followed and I lost count of them after that. In volume 2, was a song Toca’s Miracle by Fragma. It’s still fresh in my head like it happened yesterday. The rain seeping from under the train window and how I just absolutely had to open the window, drench my face in the rain water so I could let some of my tears out and not look unstable to my fellow passengers. I really needed a miracle to pull myself through it all. I was very alone and I couldn’t show it to anyone. I couldn’t look weak. I was anxious.
I remember the hushed silence beneath that tree-lane when my dad and I went to meet his friend in the CSEB colony in Bhilai for we had to look for a room for me to live in. It was a new place, a new phase of life and somehow I felt my weakness pouring out through my sweat and tears. While he sat in the office with his friend, I felt so alone I had to get out and walk. I still had my walkman and the album this time was Significant Other by Limp Bizkit. The song playing was Don’t Go Off Wandering. I was wandering, wandering in that heat on a lonely road, 200 meters back and forth when my dad fetched me. I still remember looking out through the window on the day dad was supposed to leave while I was in college. He looked at me and all I could do was hug him and plead to not go for another day and well I cried too. I dreaded loneliness.
I’ve also tried to manufacture silence. Satyam Computers were in for campus recruitments. By the time, the interviewers announced our results, it was already 11:30 pm. The results were right as we’d expected – they selected me. There was no end to our joy. The smile got glued to my face. But the way I am, I had already started wondering about my future while me and my friend were on my bike headed home. We kept shouting and singing throughout the way for there was no end to our happiness. I was trying to create silence in my head. I was trying to kill all my thoughts with the shouts and abominable singing. I somehow had a feeling that this wasn’t going to last long. I was confused.
Songs have forever been my way of creating silence. I either sing or listen to them but that’s the only time I feel silence. As I write this post, I’m listening to Game Master by Paul Oakenfold. Another song that I’d patronized for the start of every exam. It just gave me the strength and enough violence in my head to do something unthinkable, write something better to someone elses satisfaction. Not many people exist in this world who don’t know my love for songs but what they don’t know is how songs influence me and my head. It’s my cure. It fills me. It calms me. It silences me.
Then came my wife and a new way I felt silence. We’d been having a rather tumultuous time with some situations in our life when we went on a trip to Goa sponsored totally by my brother. Only the two of us can tell, how much we needed that trip, her more so. It was our second day there when we went to Vagator beach. We knew there was something really special about that beach just by the road that led us to it. No rush, no traffic, trees all around and we could smell the sea and hear waves as we approached it only to get beholden by its sight. While I laid down our bags and got down to my bare essentials, she had already made her way into the sea. She kept walking and walked quite far when she sat down in the sand. I got my camera and was quite excited by the view when I saw her crying. She kept crying and I knew what it was. That silence only interrupted by the sea waves and shrieks from some far away kids was what she sought from this trip. Love and responsibility have never been her cup of tea but I could see now how hard she had tried all of her time with me. All negative energy seemed to abandon her and after about 5 minutes she looked at me and smiled. This was my silence. She finally had what she wanted.
Lets check out what others have got for this challenge –
A Blog About Writing, Creative Ideas, And Making A Difference In The World. I'm A Writer Who Helps Other Writers And Creative Individuals Find Their Passion And Share It With The World.
A politician needs the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn't happen - Sir Winston Churchill
