Of missing all the chaos, crowd and

We seldom realise the worth of what we have until it’s lost. The same holds true for life and everything that happens to us. Having spent a few months in another country, I realised what I missed the most. No, it wasn’t the home-cooked food, not the street food, nor home itself, but the noise!

Yes, surprising, rather shocking, as it is for you, it was for me. I missed the noise that we are so used to being in India. Whether you are sitting in the comfort zone of your home or in office, you’re never alone. This shor (noise) of so much happening around is always there, as a loyal partner.

I missed people around, too. The bheed (crowd) is something that we’ve all grown up with, at every step of our lives. I suddenly found it missing when I went abroad. “Where have all the people gone?” I would ask myself and wake up to the fact that such a world also exists. It’s the people who make a place what it is. Sometimes, too much silence can become eerie and you want to turn on the music in some form to shatter that void.

While there, I tried to convince myself that I was at a place where silence would have been welcoming and it was the sort of silence I had always sought. When I got the chance to witness it, experience it, and live it…i was elated for sure! But after a while, the feeling of mundane sets in. You wonder how to kill time and who to talk to? And you actually begin to question your status of being a social animal…are we? Because what I witnessed was people living in some other time zone where their minds had turned robotic. They were only glued to their phones with ear phones protecting them from any kind of ‘noise’, if there’s any at all. It also disconnected them from the real world. I often looked at them and thought, will our future generation ever know what actual communication is? Or is only virtual the new reality?

There was one more thing missing. Back home, it’s become an unavoidable necessity for us, the jugaad (innovative fix). No matter how wellorganised the processes might be, we can never forget how things work with a jugaad.

Another factor that gets tested beyond its limits is patience. You have to absorb and imbibe the very idea of time moving slowly. You suddenly start looking at the world from a turtle’s perspective. Things just don’t happen the way you would like them to, and the time taken would be multifold than the usual. It’s then that you understand the real meaning of the phrase, killing time. While doing so, you either settle down with the pace, or you find that boring can be interesting too!

Well, ultimately, after all the chaos and silence, you end up being where you are meant to be.

IT’S PEOPLE WHO MAKE A PLACE WHAT IT IS. SOMETIMES, TOO MUCH SILENCE CAN BECOME EERIE AND YOU WANT TO TURN ON THE MUSIC