Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation.... tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.
Jean Arp has excellently wrapped up the scenario in which we are living today. Take a look at how you start your day. At home, the roaring rotation of the washing machine, the whistle of the kettle or the pressure cooker. Out you move on your vehicle to drive to work or elsewhere and the hooting and beeping of horns, the angry and impatient 'barking' of men and women at each other in a traffic jam will greet you. Earlier, the telephone sat still on our drawing room tables. Today, the mobile phone dominates our lives so much that we check a million times if the little naughty fellow is tucked in safely in our pockets and handbags. And in the process we forget to carry our parent's necessary shopping list.
Cell phone providers are making roaring business selling their wares of different ring-tones to add to the din. From a whistling train to a horrifying Bollywood latest song tune, mobile phones start ringing anytime of the day or night all around us. Some go one step further. They add jazz or pop or a melancholic Hindi song as their caller tune – imposing such 'atrocities' on the poor caller.
Technology has grown by leaps and bounds, no doubt. These machines and metallic monsters do make everything a wee bit faster. It also makes life easy in the sense that communication, travel, business and bread and butter come faster. But at what cost? Have we human beings ever reflected on the virtues of moderation?
Noise pollution caused by the monstrous malls around us or the robotic vehicles around us effects not just humans, but birds and animals too. As far as humans are concerned, the din can cause fatigue, mental stagnation, stress and a whole lot of mental and physical side effects. Birds keep away from places where they find human noise. It is one of the reasons why sparrows have disapp-eared from cities. Keep some nuts on your kitchen window ledge. A lone squirrel may drop by to gobble it up. But the pressure cooker whistle will frighten the pretty creature away. So who's depriving the squirrels of their lunch? Humans of course!
A true story which I wish to narrate here illustrates how selfish we humans can turn out to be. Once upon a time, there lived a cock called Kingsley whom I knew, in a thickly populated area in a city. He was a pet and belonged to a family who had kept him to provide company for the team of hens they had. He was the lone cock in the pack--very beautiful and majestic. Sharp at 5 am he would crow each day. He was a cock, so he crowed. Nobody had any right to stop him or question him! This was his routine each day. But one day at 5 am Kingsley did not crow. Investigations revealed that Kingsley had been eaten up and he was “chilli chicken” on somebody's dinner plate. It seems his crowing had disturbed the neighbourhood! How low can man stoop too!
We humans cannot put up with an innocent cock's cute crow, while the birds, animals and other creatures of nature have so long been putting up with the horrible din we humans create. A time may soon come when nature, birds and animals will gang up together to wage a war against humans for destroying their habitats and their lives with our greed for more…more malls, more monstrous machines and more noise! Time for each one of us to shake our noisy conscience and imbibe silence into our souls.
(This piece is dedicated to Kingsley the Cock and more of his kind… birds and animals and nature…all exploited by humans, and yet keep silent)
( The writer can be reached at nigs3@yahoo.co.in)
