Listening to sound of silence? God bless the ear-plugs!

Sarvjit Singh

The traffic light pole at the entrance to Sector 17 plaza, on the Sector 16 side, has a horn speaker installed on it. A shrill female voice and a granular male voice continuously blare out of it, “Please follow the rules of the road .” The road users don’t mind it, I suppose, as those in cars would generally roll up their windows. Those on two-wheelers are well insulated with their helmets on. Then there are those, lost in their own thoughts to the extent that external noise does not matter to them.

But to the lesser mortals who go for morning and evening walks in the nearby Shanti Kunj, it can be annoying. When these thoughts were brewing in my head, someone suddenly decided to raise the volume, perhaps thinking it wasn’t loud enough for the intended target audience. Peace in Shanti Kunj was definitely shattered now. I actually stood under the nasty little horn and prayed it goes kaput, but the prayer went unheard.

Then recalling the tenet, “It is easier to put on shoes, than to carpet the whole world”, I stuffed cotton that my wife gave me, deep in both my ears and strutted out of the house for a walk, and the sound subsided with it.

Now, an interesting thing started, as soon as I reached and stepped inside the garden built on Japanese ethos. Not only the external sounds had subsided, the inner sounds got as much amplified, as if I had pressed the stethoscope into my ears and could move the probe with the little diaphragm, anywhere on me, by shifting attention.

The low-frequency thump of footsteps suddenly became so audible that it started travelling through the legs, combining in spine and resonating in the head. The nerves seemed to be nudging the vertebrae to fall along the line of gravity, quick. Suddenly, immersed in a silence, people looked different. Wow! Eureka! As I returned, happy, I did not remove my virtual stethoscope, waiting for more revelations. As I munched on a guava, the sound of it being crushed made the movement of the jaw visible.

With dwindling external noise, the focus was now on listening to the contours of the voice that my own larynx was generating, and it started showing up like a graph on a screen. The eye could notice parts of it lopped here, and accentuated there, and wanting to be corrected.

So dawned the realisation what they mean when they say, “Your will, not mine!” Or nearer home, when Kabir said, “Bura jo dekhan main chala, bura na miliya koi, jo mann dekhiya aapna, mujh se bura na koe”

As I set out to analyse faults in the worldly substrate, each one to a fault in me, I could correlate.

(The writer is an IAS officer of Punjab cadre)