The sounds of silence

By Sheila Kumar

Speaking for myself (and I’m certain, speaking for you) I often think I’m living in a vortex of noise. Surrounded by noise, assailed by noise, disturbed by noise, sometimes rendered distraught by noise. I’m old enough to remember when noise basically meant loud rock concerts, a mixer-grinder doing its work for a short period of time, the sudden backfire from a passing motorbike, sometimes the drumming of the rain on rooftops, though very few of us classified the last as noise.

It is quite another matter now. It is a dismal epiphany but we have realized noise has become part of our everyday lives. At any given time, city sounds include the high decibel whine of a borewell drilling for water, cement mixers grating at top speed, the clamour of construction activity, car horns blaring, car stereos blaring louder, people walking on the streets talking very loudly to each other and into their mobile phones. Add to this apartments nose-to-nose with each other, letting in the sounds of shouting squabbles, the frenzied barking of dogs, and what you have is a perfect noise storm. I’m not even including the sound of the 3 am koel or in my case, the strange raucous cawing of crows well past midnight. Maybe, like the sound of falling rain, bird calls don’t figure as noise. In their book, Noise, Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein inform us that noise is the basic root cause of bad judgement, and proceed to tell us how to dial it down for maximum positive impact on our lives. This, of course, is more than just external noise. The authors dissect and analyse the scales of noise, Level noise and Pattern noise, informational cascades and its impact on noise. All the algorithms of noise, in fact. The authors of this behavioural science work help us identify and recognise, understand, listen to noise and reduce it to the minimum. It also shows us how to accommodate some amount of noise in such a manner that it won’t come in the way of our making proper decisions. What’s more, they aver that harnessing noise can actually help us make sound judgement calls. Apparently, there’s good noise and bad noise; only, your high school English teacher taught you to say ‘noise’ for the bad and ‘sounds’ for the good!

You’d be right in imagining that what with the external noise, the voices in your head and digital noise, all the dice are loaded against you. It’s like being told to do a digital detox. You do just that for a day, maybe two days if your willpower is heroic…then you are back to Square One with all its attendant noise. In his splendid monograph, The Art of Stillness, Adventures in Going Nowhere, the writer and quasi-monk Pico Iyer urges us to go still, tap into our inner silence, and do whatever it takes to reduce the noise in our lives. Iyer tells us that the point of gathering stillness is not to enrich the sanctuary we are at or the mountaintop we have climbed but to bring that calm into the motion, the commotion, of the world. What Iyer talks of is sitting still, as befits the author of a book on the art of stillness. However, that stillness can very easily be expanded in scope to include silence. In which case, Iyer’s message would read thus: Sit silently and fall deeper in love with the world around you. Sit silent and let fresh imaginative thoughts come to you. Sit silent and recharge yourself to face the world once again. Sit silent to clear your head and still your emotions. The flip side of gathering silence is that doubts start to flow inside your newly emptied- of- noise head. Are you on the right path to personal and professional happiness is one question that emerges loudly from the surrounding quiet. Are you doing things right? Are you headed for a rise or fall? Then, silence can often bring with it memories of all you don’t have, more than all you do. Which makes it crucial for you to locate that ‘off ’ button, turn the noise off and make a friend of silence.

Yes, you have to do all the usual stuff to reach that ‘off ’ button: turn off the TV, get away from your laptop, place a time bound moratorium on cell phone activity, put down the book you are reading, switch off the music you are listening to. Calm your mind, don’t block your thoughts, just let them come…and go. And sit still and quiet for as long as you can. Till you can feel the fluid flow of silence filling you up. Some call this activity meditation. Some call it gathering the sounds of silence.

(Bengaluru-based journalist Sheila Kumar is an independent writer, manuscript editor and author of four books)