SILENCE

In the neurotic megapolis that Mumbai is, it's hard to earn your two minutes of silence.
The more you want to be alone, the more it hits you: The honking's incessant; everywhere you look, tempers are frayed --- on trains, in the neighbourhood, on the streets, at the workplace... The verbal violence just seems to be getting more intense than ever.

Popular music too, these days, appears to be a series of ear-splitting shouts, if not an assault by screeching voices and violins... You just have to hear Himeshbhai hammer away, "Ek baar aaja, aaja, aaja, aaja, aaaaaaaaaaajaaaaaaa" till it rips your senses apart and you'll know what I'm talking about...

In many ways, I'm lucky to live in an area where I get to hear a variety of birds chirp their way through the morning, and very often, contribute their own little notes when my music class is in progress. And like in music, I notice that the marked difference in the high-pitched ambient noise that jars each day, and the music of the birds -- or for that matter, the cadences of a raga -- is the silence that fills your being between the notes.

Eckhart Tolle says: "Pay attention to the gap -- the gap between two thoughts, the brief, silent space between words in a conversation, between the notes of a piano or flute, or the gap between the in-breath and the out-breath. When you pay attention to those gaps, awareness of 'something' becomes -- just awareness. The formless dimension of pure consciousness arises from within you and replaces identification with form."

And if anything can hold my attention for more than a minute, even if it's pure silence, I can safely tell myself I'm going many notches higher on the evolutionary scale!