Of the lives people live..

We are suddenly more aware of the ‘lives ‘people around us live.. or atleast appear to ‘live’. One hot-lazy Saturday afternoon when even afternoon nap is elusive, I log in to facebook only to spend the next 1+ hours tracking the lives of friends, acquaintances. Yeah something like the peeping  Tom or generally face-booking!

As I browsed through the photo albums, I was entering into their worlds and trying to juxtapose those random pieces to create the storyboards of their lives. I knew this girl way back in school. Our fathers were college friends but we didn’t really much carry forward the family legacy. So I am totally out of touch with her since I left school. And today unable to think of doing anything more constructive I look at her album. Honestly as kids we had no inkling of what each one of us would grow into. Or perhaps back then we never tried to fast forward into our futures and picture that stuff. Now all thanks to Facebook I can rewind back into the little snippets of the past which are public to ‘friends’ and witness the part I missed. And see my ‘friends’ grow into the people they are now, and the life that they apparently live. Well I cannot imagine a conversation between the two of us exchanging notes on our lives so far but in an impersonal way each of us is remotely aware of others existence.

Next I moved on to track down a dear teacher from school. I remember her as this sophisticated, young pretty woman who stood almost 6 feet and to add to her spell she spoke impeccable English. Today I see her looking seraphic, flanked by her daughters, holidaying in Europe, Jaipur. Lovely!  It was wonderful to see her after so many years.

Our social space has definitely undergone a radical change with the growing advent of social networking sites. How we ‘project’ ourselves, ‘express ourselves’ has changed because we are now aware of a bigger audience waiting for our ‘updates’.  ‘Prohibition never stood a chance against exhibition’, and it seems like exhibition has just found a new stage. Yes at some level it appears as if people are merely exhibiting their lives, their every move- well keep it coming, who’s complaining.  Birthday, Weddings all personal events, official/nonofficial trips,  daily trivia everything has an audience. One has to comment and tweet, to make others aware of his existence in the impersonal cyber space. There is the maddening physical world where we live and another virtual world which is getting louder by the day. It’s almost like striking a balance to retain your sanity J

Silence..

Silence is full of music..  The silence of a girl as she nods a ‘yes’ is music to the ears of the soul hanging at the other end!

A moment of silence can sometimes put at ease weary nerves, balm bruised souls. You can almost hear the music of life pulsating if you sit silently under a shady tree, along a flowing river, sit gazing at the starry sky or observe the antics of a new-born child. The most eloquent silence that I have experienced was along this nearly deserted water front in Kanyakumari, sitting on a boulder with my eyes closed I could sense the speed , direction of the waves coming from afar and hitting the shore. There was a rhythm to the coming and the crashing..

R. Kelly croons,’See I was on the verge of breaking down
Sometimes silence can seem so loud’. You try & try to shut it out but there it is, the looming silence. It doesn’t let you in peace just leaves you anxious all along. The consciousness of the absence of words which you can almost see hanging in mid air. Then there are times when its pitch dark to even see the writing on the wall, it’s a blind silence but again ‘loud’. The long wait where you strain to hear some human voice beyond the all-encompassing silence. The childhood days when before the results were announced, all you could here in the silent auditorium was the loud sound of your own breathing as you wiped your sweaty palms. The silence of anticipation and the cruel silence of hopeless waiting, we have all experienced it one time or the other. The disciplinarian demanding ‘Pin drop silence’ seems almost kinder than being caught in an awkward silence with a close friend .

‘With time we become people with more of silence in between. Perhaps, we mature into more keen beings. But we tend not to express..’ This is where things get complex, when we choose not to express. It may be because of that old brute, ‘ego’ raising a sky high mountain for us to surmount before we can speak up. It may be because we think too much and call in prudence to restrain the mumble within. Strangely at times it happens that all you want to do is speak but words betray you completely. It was so effortless to talk to the person standing in front of you but now as hard as you may try to speak up, all you can muster is silence. There is a natural rhythm to conversation with people, it flows, at times there may be some ebbs and falls but the continuity remains.  Yet some conversations make you stray into the territory which is the abode of silence. Some make their way out some stay there forever…