Sharing Silence

I feel music is what arrives between silences; it is indeed the pauses that make our compositions what they are. So too with words and all that is said without it. Silence can sit light on one's shoulders, bear heavy in their hearts and often be missed for everything that distracts. Almost like a black dot on a white canvas, we get absorbed by the noise and forget the blank background.

However, on certain days and nights, silence bestows its infinite grace upon me and I have the luxury to mull about the vagaries of life. Or just observe the buzzing, hustling, hooting, screeching world around me, sitting safe in my own cocoon of noiseless-ness. It is a blessing on some days. On other days, it gives me a privilege to embark on a nostalgic trip. On many other days, it is a slow vehicle that carries me from one moment to the next, efficiently curing an anxiety about the future.

Suddenly, finding oneself in the middle of nowhere, literally or figuratively, in life, could turn out to be a blessing. One can be themselves, with only themselves for company and the silence is golden and nourishing.

Over the past month, when I had plenty of chance to travel to villages and to towns, to mofussils and to cities, I found my moments of silence. Sitting with a drained mobile phone but an absolutely charged mind, I found silence in the twinkling ripples of the night's lights on a pond's surface. Silence, arrived unannounced and compassionately offered company, on a long bus journey where I was the sole passenger. (It might have been a metaphor for my life, but I would like to believe that my life's landscape is less dustier than Indian roads.) On a chilly night, silence shrouded me in disbelief and enormity, as I glanced upwards and reacquainted myself with the stars of a rural sky. On yet another night, while traveling alone, my late night train pushed to an unearthly hour past midnight, I sat in an unknown railway station twiddling thumbs and letting my thoughts take over the barren tracks. Between the jerks of a bumpy bike ride, in the massive courtyard of an ancient temple, on a soft lawn watching a chirpy wagtail, after multiple cups of tea on a rainy morning… silence arrived. Loud enough to shut everything else, silence arrived.

During one of the longer periods of silence, I had the opportunity to think of all the people I may have shared my silence with. Most of them, old friends kind enough to bear with the wordlessness and graceful enough to grow with me during such periods. Others, newer friends, random acquaintances, who in an enormous stroke of luck and mercy did not find the need to disturb the silence that pervaded our conversations.

I sat by a temple pond, with hours to kill before the night bus, and my mind swiftly took over. It jumped from people to places to things to whatnot. But when the mind tired, the silence was bliss, it was wholesome and healing.

First, my old friends. After school, wandering the same streets that witnessed our childhood, treading the same beaten path and sharing stories from a teenage life that revolved around who's who and who's what; it would all wind down to gulping some cool rasna and letting our thoughts trail into silence. A comfortable silence that knew not the threat of competition or the apprehensions of distances burying our relationships-- only school friends withstand that test of silence.

With friends from college, who have completed many circles around Connaught Place with me, and then sunk into an understanding reverie at a nearby tea stall or coffee house. No, there was no need to catch up any more. No need to pick up on what movies, stars, sportspersons or musicians had caught our fancy. When the early morning and late night walks in the University campus would mean just keeping beat to the other's steps, it was silence that cemented many of my friendships.

And then with other friends, after a hearty meal and a box of old Kishore Kumar or Rafi songs slowly becoming a part of the white noise, silence would engulf us in an odd self-awareness. It was not awkward, it never was.

Then it occurred to me that silences between persons real time (not going AWOL on FB, Twitter or Whatsapp) required a reasonable amount of trust, respect towards the other's space and time, and a strength that stemmed from the comfort of knowing the other person well enough. It is not so easy with a stranger, new acquaintance, or a relatively new friend. With a stranger, the trust is missing. With the new acquaintance, the comfort is lacking. With a relatively new friend, the novelty of the friendship and the excitement to know everything about one another unfortunately removes the respect for their own time and space.

Sometimes one has to consciously strive for silence. At other times, silence presents itself adorned in self-important grandeur. Host it anyway. Silence is a guest one must strive to keep with themselves forever.
Here, silence came to me decked in the temple's festivities. I had a bright, old, massive temple yard to myself, for hours.

My moments of silence have always led me to some clarity. Sometimes significant enough to alter life, sometimes small enough to keep me happy and occupied at least for that moment. If achieving that level of happiness and quietitude is also meditation, I am richer for it. Creating that little time and space where everything else ceases to exist- with or without company- is a must. We open ourselves to details that had always existed but we had never noticed. We embark on new levels of travelling within. We became stronger, more meaningful and definitely more effective with our words, our music.

There is immense gratitude towards all those who have shared their silences with me for you found me worthy of it. There is immense gratitude for all those who bore my silences without any complaints, I always thought you were worthy of it. All around us, the Universe and Nature, keep nudging us towards that sweet spot time and again. These are too sacred hints to be ignored. In them, find your oldest friends and eternal company. Non-judgmental, ever-tolerant and sure-to-forgive, Time and Space do us all a favour. So why not revel in it? And it's okay, the truths revealed to you in your silence are always your own. Find your silence, your strength. Share it.

Some odd truths of my life, written at some point of actualisation and fortunately, within reach.

Of One Rural Beauty, the People's President

I dislike crying. It leaves me with a headache and immense regret at wallowing in self-pity-- two more things that I dislike. But to cry for another's pain, another's loss, another's struggle is something else. It lends empathy the ammunition of courage and strength not just to climb personal mountains, but to move them.

Joker made me cry, in the theatre, unabashedly, and I was but a thin shell of shame away from cracking up and bawling out loud. It is about the story of Mannar Mannan (literally meaning Ruler of Rulers) and his comrades (Ponoonjal and Isai) being small-town activists tackling pan-Indian problems head on. Through a variety of protest techniques (and immensely clever word play) they try to catch the eye of the government, its officials and civilians alike to take up a range of issues. But who's watching? An amused audience on Facebook and media-persons for their fillers mostly.

In a single moment, it was easy to trace all the stories that flood our papers and how a compromise fails us in protecting our citizenry again and again. A rare few have the audacity to take on the government like Isai, President and Ponoonjal. That audacity must translate more than clicking "likes".

Nonetheless it takes guts and immense courage to walk into the police station, get hauled into prisons and time and again meet with failures at courts, dust your backs and get back to protesting against corruption, sexual abuse, alcoholism, illegal mining and you-name-what. I know that because I've marched up to police stations and magistrates and collectorates in the past. I've never seen the insides of a jail, a courtroom or a detention room; never been at the receiving end of riot control or mild/intense police brutalities. Yet, it was intimidating to walk unarmed when one can predict the possibility of legalised violence against themselves. And I am sure most of us have not experienced this kind of physical brutality. But we are all victims of the brutalities and inefficiencies of the system in many other ways.

Our roads cave in, our buses catch fire on their own, our women are not safe on the roads, our students do not get affordable, quality education and our systems leak. Like the bucket of water a character in the movie carries with him to use a dirty, stinking public toilet. The water is needed to wash. But the bucket has multiple holes and is leaking already. How will the toilet ever be clean?

Some of us remain silent about the things that affect us, that sap the living spirit in us, that corner us and abuse us and others around us. Not everybody though. Some scream until they are hoarse, fight until their bones give up and then some more. It should pinch the first set of us when we think about the second set and the causes that they represent. It should pinch us when we violate traffic rules, that somebody else is dying because of the same somewhere else. It should pinch us when we waste fresh, clean water from our taps, that others get flouride and arsenic from their taps and others don't even have taps. It should pinch us that we let food rot when leakages in the PDS ensure that children die hungry and malnourised even in 2016. Black money, tax evasion, corruption in contracts, settling for poor quality in our health and education systems, pending reforms of the police, legislatures and judiciary... every single thing should pinch us.

Until we are personally affected, it never pinches us. Does it? With Time providing an inescapable illusion of healing, we forget even those personal losses and victimisation. How then can I fight for somebody else? Who grants us the power to change and effect change in the world around ourselves? Mannan becomes the catalyst himself. Taking after the narrations of an influencer in his life (who affectionately motivated him as the Rural Beauty), he annoints himself as the President. To execute orders, to implement reforms, to campaign and work for the people. He will now be known as Janathipathi or the President.

It is evocative because of the personal transformation in Mannan. In a particularly well-built-up scene, Mannan finds himself trapped, by different tiers of the Executive, in his own house, fighting to save parts of himself and his life, even as the *real* Head of the Union heralds a new beginning for the village folk. It is gut wrenching in its irony. Mannan's fight then is powerless and he is helpless in his desperation-- a struggle all too real. You want him to do something radical and break free because by then you realise that it is no longer about Mannan, his house, his fight...

That realisation and the simmering feeling to set things right, as they should be, have a name-- idealism. We have many kinds of idealists around us. In a world wrecked with chaos and pessimism, they are the ones who carry a glowering hope of better days. If you see the spark in yourself or in somebody around you, your only duty is to kindle that fire. The possibility of the fire annihilating problems ablaze with power to restore things rightfully in their place might be bleak. But support those voices, we must.

Those voices stem from a place deep, deep within that is either thankfully ignorant of or tragically immune to hurt, failure, loss or shame. As the President declares, it is a voice that accompanies the protest of the body, through the Music of the Body. When the sound of poverty and the beat of birthright are rumbling in your stomach and throbbing in your veins, just let the music play. Do not stifle it. In yet another moving imagery from Joker, I appeal to you to water the rose bud, even when you see that Rose is dying. Then you watch it bloom even on the darkest of days.

The admirable and heroic thing about President, his counsel Ponoonjal and his secretary/spokesperson is that they don't know when to stop. They are persevering, forbearing, gritty, witty and indomitable as a collective. However, they started as individuals and then became a collective. It gives you and me the hope to be a better person even marginally. And if the fire's been raging for a while, I urge you to do it NOW. Want to teach under-privileged kids? Want to become a fitter, more disciplined person? Want to work on a farm? Want to clean up your society? Want to haul up your Councillor/MLA/MP? Do it now. You will find the resources. You will find your collective. You will find redemption. Whatever it is, put in the most marginal effort to become a better person everyday. If it is a cause, give it at least 2 hours of your 168 hours in a week. Do it.

At so many points in the movie I laughed until I was embarrassed; embarrassed that we had settled comfortably insensitive to the atrocities, inefficiencies and the brutalities. I wished so hard that the wells of pathos wouldn't breach and expose me to the cruel mistreatment of the system. Voices like Ponoonjal's do that to us.
'A nation of sheep begets a government of wolves.'

On a final closing note, getting to the subject-matter of Joker. We need those eccentrics, misfits, rebels and activists to question the government, the Powers-That-Be. Irrespective of whether they seek answers within the system, outside of it or discard the system altogether, we need them for a democracy to survive. As one friend so long ago put it, "we need to stay awake and keep the government awake so that we may sleep peacefully." If V for Vendetta slapped you on your face, Visaarnai left you with goosebumps, Peepli Live made you laugh and Well Done Abba forced you to think-- Joker has all those elements and more. Watch it.

The President shouldn't die. Long live the President!

(PS- I have a throbbing headache now, but my heart is lighter and aglow with hope. The pain will pass. The vulnerability, however, will find a cure only in empowerment.)