Mid-Life Crisis?

 

A few days ago, I was in the office and during a friendly chat, I gave a Nagraj reference, the superhero from Raj Comics from the 90s. This reference was met with the most quizzical of looks I have ever received. So I probed them if they didn’t know about Nagraj, Super Commando Dhruv and Doga and I was met with silence and blank faces. I asked further if they hadn’t know about Raj comics, when one guy asked me which channel it used to come on. I suddenly felt very old.

I enjoy playing FPS games like Call Of Duty. I play it almost every night before going to bed. It’s a team game where you squad up and play. Regular players form their squads and play with the same set of people everyday. I am in a similar situation. I have a squad of about 3-4 people with whom I play COD everyday(almost). The thing is that you talk to each other during the game and over a period of time familiarity breeds and you get to know a little bit about your squad members. In one game, during the slightly lull part of the game, one of my squad members was chiding another one about his childish actions and he referenced to me saying that this guy should learn from me who has completed "half of his life". The context doesn’t matter, but I quickly jumped in saying “Hang on bro. That’s not true.” To which he replied “You must be 35+ years old and nowadays most people are not making it past 70. So you have already lived half your life.” The game moved on but that statement stuck with me.

I couldn’t sleep that night. It’s an ironic thing to be made aware of your mortality while playing a game where you win by killing the greatest number of players. I had been under the impression that I was just entering the mature phase of life. Lots of things left to be done. Normally, whenever you are faced with the ephemeral nature of your life, a checklist comes into your mind. The items on the list vary from person to person but for most of the people, its about those Indian old school middle class values of ‘having made it’ in life. Owning a house, car, financial safeguards, that ever-fantasized foreign trip etc. The reason for me not being able to sleep that night was that I hadn’t ticked off most of the items on the checklist. Being a Maths guy, it automatically comes to mind that if X number of items are ticked off in half the time, then in full time 2X number of items will be ticked off and for me that 2X was much lower than the number of items in the list I would be reasonably happy with to be ticked off.

Then came the downward spiral and the eternal question of what am I doing in life. I struggled with it throughout the night. In the morning, I found clarity and it came from a very unlikely source, my son. He is at the age when he has started to eat food on his own and since these are early days, he takes a bit of time, which is not entirely ideal when he starts running late for school. To push him along, I went the competition route. I told him “Lets see who finishes eating one bread first.” After I had wolfed down my bread piece, I turned to him and said “See beta, I won the race. Come on, Catch up with me.” He coolly looked at me and put his tiny hand on by back and said “Well done papa. You finish your food fast and I will finish mine slowly.” And with that he went back to methodically taking small bites.

Our life is not really a comp
etition to see who ends up with more trophies. Each person has to figure out their own journey. Plan and put into place habits and processes which will lead to long term goal fulfillments and if some of those goals don’t get fulfilled, so be it. Life goes on and worrying about the past doesn’t help enjoy the present. I have been taking steps towards checking off those checklist items for a few years now and  hopefully somewhere down the line, they come to fruition. But one thing is for certain, I am not losing my sleep over it.

Cricket and our Lives

 Its been close to 4 years since I last wrote something on this blog and even though in the grander scheme of things, it doesnt feel like a really long time but in actuality, humanity itself has gone through a major upheaval and 4 years ago might as well have been a different era in human history.

COVID hit us and the life came to a standstill. Several lives were lost. Everything changed, from the way we work to the way we think about our lives. The minor quibbles and petty problems which plagued our day to day lives, suddenly seemed way less important. And so changed the way we thought about a lot of things. Cricket became the one source of respite from the problems in the world at least for Indians. It also helped that the ICT was playing a lot more cricket than it used to. And the other important thing was that they were playing well, winning a lot more than losing. So in a small way, their performances at the world stage became a small source of gratification for Indians.

By the time 2023 came around, the following of the cricket team became a staple conversation along with the weather and 'weekend plans'. In fact any light conversation i was having with anybody, did involve cricket (because i hate discussing politics). It almost came as a shock to me when i met a guy (read normal well-adjusted human being) during my work, who didnt care or follow cricket. It was incredulous to me that for him Cricket was just another sport like a volleyball or a sepak takraw. By the time the Cricket World cup in India came around, Cricket had become a part of Indian subconscious.

It reached it crescendo during the world cup where our team was literally decimating every other team which it faced. The euphoria surrounding every Indian performance was something I had yet to experience. Almost every discussion or chat had World Cup parlance being used, often even in business setting. After every Indian win, i actually noticed happier work environment and smoother and faster flow of meetings. In fact even some of the insufferable people I used to come across were oddly tolerable.

It seemed to have been written in stars. India breezed past the league stage and defeated NZ in the semis. We were primed for glory. Even the PM was coming to watch the match in his eponymous stadium. The supremacy in all ICC rankings was about to bear fruition as India was poised to lift the world cup once again. But it all came crashing down in the finals. Sure, the team which played better on the given day won the match but India was by far the best team in the competition. 

What happened after that was something i was not ready for. The sheer disappointment and sadness which engulfed me was not expected. I pride myself on being a fairly even-tempered person but the loss did affect me in a way i had not envisioned. The next few days after the final, were not great. People were snappy, the meetings were drawn out and contentious. Previously, I used to happily introduce cricket into any conversation but post the finals I actively avoided any mention or discussion on the topic. It took me a few days to get over that feeling and accept that what happens in a cricket match has absolutely no bearing on our day to day lives. It did help to see the Indians drubbing Aussies 4-1 ten days later, but thats besides the point.

As i end this post, I am happy to be back to my usual self. Cricket is now just one of my many interests. I am telling myself that trophies do not define what we are as Indians, who are getting into dominant positions in all facets of world, not just cricket. And I am starting to get excited about the month long tough cricket tour of SA, in which ICT will most probably lose quite a few matches. But hey, atleast the hope is back.

Signing off till the next time. 

The Last Meeting

We both knew the evening would be awkward. The text messages arranging the meet were terse and polite yet they didn't fool anyone. We met at our erstwhile haunt but didn't know how to greet each other. A hug would have been inappropriate but a wave would have been equally hurtful. So we ended up shaking hands. Sometimes something as simple as an eye contact is the most difficult thing to do. There is always the fear that you could the eyes and lose all the restraint you have put on your body to not let the emotions bubbling just beneath the surface and let them out. Today was one of those days. It was just about an year ago that we had last met each other. It was right before she was leaving for the US on a year long work assignment. And a lot had changed since then. We had parted a couple of months back but there still remained the issue of iPod she had already bought for me and I had paid for. Today was supposed to be purely transactional but in actuality it was the closure both of us were desperately looking for. Letting go after desperately holding on to something tightly for so long is nothing short of nightmare which is why we were both reluctant to look at each other. She was staring at the neatly manicured grass near her feet and I was literally twiddling my thumbs.

I saw her make a decision and then dig around in the purse. The iPod box was out and was being extended over the table. I was very careful to make sure that while talking the box, there was no physical contact to spark off anything. I needed the evening to end but also wished for it to never end.

She got up. I got up with her. We both stood there for a minute without moving a muscle. She looked into my eyes and I looked into hers. I saw regret in them and she saw the pain in mine. We didn't say a single word but our eyes were talking. I broke off the stare and turned to leave. Then I heard her voice and my heart skipped a few beats. She said "I hope you like it."

I turned all the while dialling back the tears that were welling up just beneath my eyes. It was the most thankless "Thank you" I had ever said in my life. She said "Bye" and turned around and left. I slumped back on the chair staring at her exit, hoping to see her look back one last time but it never happened. 

The moment she turned to leave, she wanted to turn back but she couldnt. Too much had happened since the last time she had seen me. She kept on going because she knew I would call her, or atleast she had hoped. 

I got up, pocketed the iPod box, zigged and zagged furiously through the traffic and reached home. I opened the box, booted up the iPod only to find that it had one song on it. "See you again" by Charlie Puth and Wiz Khalifa. I listened to it and all the memories rushed back in a single jolt. I was wallowing in self pity when through watery eyes I saw a note inside the box. It said "I wish we could start all over again." I read the note thrice before putting it back in the box. My hands slowly reached my phone and found her number. With great amount of resolve, I hit the call button.

She picked up after the first ring. She said "Oh babe! I was hoping you would call me. I am sorry." 

I paused for a couple of seconds before finding my voice. 

"You better be sorry. You gave me a used iPod bitch. I want my money back!". 

Becoming a Father

It’s been 38 days since my son was born and it’s been a happening 38 days so far. I remember the day he was born. We were sitting in the waiting room when my name was called and the doctor informed me that I have had a boy.  My first reaction was relief that the whole ordeal called pregnancy was finally over. I remember that the only things on my mind the first few days were insurance formalities, hospital expenditure, well-being of my wife (who oddly enough, everybody was fine neglecting) and finally the health of the barely born kid.

The first time I held the baby was nothing short of a disaster. I had seen others do it, and I know the theory of how-to, but when I first tried to lift the baby up from his crib, all that cognizance went out the window. I lifted him using his shoulders. What happened after that seems to have happened in slow motion. The kid’s head started falling back as his body was coming up and at the same time simultaneous shrieks and cries of admonishment were originating from my mother and his mother. The kid was mid-air when I realized my mistake and tried to rectify it by plopping him back into the crib. The soft plop of his head against a well-padded crib was the loudest crash I had felt in my entire life. For the next 2 days I kept a really close eye on the kid dreading and pleading with God that my stupidity didn’t cause any damage to the kid. 

Perhaps the most anticlimactic moment came 3 days after his birth. I had seen both my parents get emotional as soon as they held the little dude for the first time. I had never seen tears in my dad’s eyes before the day he nestled the little one for over an hour in his lap. My wife was already bewitched by the kid and everybody around me were enchanted with him except me. For me, the kid was just a bundle of pink who slept more than 21 hours a day and greenish poo came out of it from time to time. I had seen and read that the real bond between a father and kid is formed when the kid holds on to the father’s finger. I wanted to create that overdrawn cliché to feel what I should. I tried to thrust my finger into the kids grip, but he wouldn’t have it. When I finally managed to get my finger into his hands, he just popped his hand open and let it go. I tried that 5-6 times but everytime the kid refused to hold on to the finger.

Then came the day when we brought him back home with the mother in tow. I had seen all the people around me watching a sleeping kid for hours without getting bored, and I just didn’t get it. I sat down next to the kid that night, in order to talk to my wife, who was just enamoured with him. I told her how the kid refused to hold my finger, but she didn’t believe me. So I tried demonstrating it and this time he held on to the finger and gripped it like his life depended on it. It was a very strange and inexplicable feeling. I was feeling ecstasy, fear, anxiety, pride, laughter and crying all at the same time. I suddenly felt that connection, which was missing till then and thus donned the heaviest hat I had ever taken on, that of a father.

Now I frequently watch me sleeping son for hours. Can’t think of any better stress buster. Now I feel proud when I get him to stop crying. Now I take selfies with him (but don’t show it to everybody). Now I change his diapers without a second thought. So in the end, my son was born 38 days ago but I became a father since the past 32 days.

The Devil's Advocate

A few days ago I happen to have some free time on my hand and invariably I ventured into the comments of a muted whatsapp group conversation. Like the case is with so many whatsapp groups, this inconsequential debate featured comments from a lot of people discussing how Dushehara signified the triumph of absolute good over absolute evil. Although people had put some good points about the good, but there was one unequivocal thought which resounded throughout the debate. It was about how Raavana was a truly evil person. It got me thinking, was Raavana really a bad guy or just a misunderstood one.

The cynical in me wanted to look at the sequence of events that transpired. There was a king, who was enjoying hunting in a forest. That may have been his era’s equivalent of hanging out at the mall, like many youngsters do. He saw a girl, got intrigued and followed her around a bit. May be he got mixed signals from her and maybe he just misunderstood them, as many guys do. Then he saw that she was always surrounded by 2 hefty guys, who he naturally assumed to be her brothers. He created a distraction to lure the guys away from the girl, and when she was finally alone, he made his move. That move was to kidnap the girl and bring her back to his kingdom. That move could easily be construed as a little extreme form of sending a facebook friend request and poking, of that era. Mind you, he did not even touch this girl the wrong way. He brought her back to his kingdom and showered her with all the royal comforts. Most people say this action was immoral since he was already married and still wanted to be with this girl, but another way to look at it is that maybe he just fell in love and was blinded by it. We forgive so much harsher things done by the leading men in our films than this.

Then he found out that the ‘assumed’ brothers were actually this girl’s husband and brother-in-law. May be he felt an “OOPS” moment. He keeps waiting for a negotiation meeting with the guy, when suddenly he finds out that this girl’s husband is apparently a God and is assembling an army to march on to his kingdom. Next thing he knows, one of the God’s lieutenants, comes to his kingdom and satisfies his hidden arsonist tendencies by burning down Raavana’s beautifully curated garden. What’s more is that his own ‘power-hungry’ brother has joined the husband’s ranks and is adding fuel to their fire. And then lo and behold, a huge army is at his kingdom gates. Doesn’t a man have the right to defend his home against invaders? US constitution has second amendment, just for this scenario.

War ensues and Raavana loses. The husband could simply have rescued his wife and left, but no. He has to kill Raavana and establish the power-hungry kin as the ruler. Maybe Vibhishan wasn’t a great ruler, maybe he was like Joffrey from Game of Thrones. We don’t know as there are no sequel to Ramayana.

Raavana was a very learned person. He composed 'Shiva Tandava Strota' which is a prominent religious text. He was a scholar, a great strategist and an intriguing illusionist. He was a very devoted shiva-bhakt and if not for that one mistake, he could have gotten his own hero franchise. May be he was like Severus Snape from Harry potter world. The point is that we don’t know because no one really looked at him like a normal human being.

Sometimes, all it takes is one mistake to unravel everything you have worked for your entire life. Thousands of years later, everyone still thinks of Raavana as an evil person. They create giant statues of Raavana and burn them to the ground every year. All of this, just because he fell in love. I see Raamayana as a tragic love story instead of the “triumph of Good over Evil”. But don’t get me wrong. I neither sympathize nor do I absolve Raavana’s actions. The point of this blog is to hopefully open some minds and to illustrate that maybe we should look at the other side of the coin before judging someone.

Regrets

A long time ago one of my friends told me a story. I don’t recall it exactly so I am going to put it down in my words. There was this smart professor at a college. One day he took all his students to a sugarcane field and told them that in order to make the best quality sugar, you need to have the best quality sugarcane. The best quality sugarcane is the one which is the tallest. He turned to one student and he said to him “Peter, go find the tallest sugarcane you can find so that you can make the best sugar out of it. But be advised, you are not to pick up a sugarcane on your way back. Once you have moved on from a cane, you cannot come back to it. You need to pick the cane on your way forward and whichever you chose, you would bring it back. ” The fellow was obviously overwhelmed by the task, because standing in front of him was a field full of tall sugarcanes. So he entered the field tentatively. He found one cane that was quite tall. But he thought that I have just entered the field, there will be many more canes taller than this one. So he proceeded ahead. Once again he came across a sugarcane which was taller than any he had yet seen. But once again he thought that there would be another one taller than this one ahead. This went on for a while, where he kept rejecting the tall canes in hopes of finding a much taller cane ahead until he reached the end of the field. There he realized that now he can’t go back, so he found the tallest one at the edge and came back out of the field. The professor along with his students were standing there waiting for him. The young boy sheepishly gave the sugarcane to the professor. The professor then went on to measure the length of the cane. “This cane is 5 foot 3 inches tall. I can stand here and see canes much taller than this. Anyways stand aside.”

He then asked another boy Charlie to go into the field and gave him the same exact instructions.  Charlie stepped into the field confidently and within 10 minutes he came back carrying a sugarcane. The professor measured this one and announced that this was 5 foot 8 inches tall. The professor turned to him and said “even though you have brought one of the taller canes in the field but I know for a fact that there is 6 foot 5 inches cane in the field. How is it that I sent two guys in to get it and neither one of you came out with it?”

Both of the students were embarrassed and suddenly found something interesting to stare at on the ground. The professor started laughing. He said “don’t worry guys. This was not a test but an exercise in practicality. There are two types of people in this world. The first type who keep on rejecting every good thing they come across in hopes of finding a much better one somewhere in the future, but when they reach the end of the road, they settle for something far less than what they had rejected. Such people end up regretting their stupidity and lead an unsatisfying life. Peter here, did emulate such people almost exactly. Then there is the other category of people who learn from other people’s mistakes. Charlie here saw how Peter screwed his assignment up and went into the field and found the first tallest cane he could find and brought it back. He knew that he needed to find one which was taller than what Peter had brought. You could see it from their demeanors when they came out of the field. One the one hand Peter came out looking troubled, Charlie came out like he had just won a championship. These other type of people, they recognize a good thing when they see one. Even though they know that there is something better out there, they don’t throw away a good thing just because they may or may not find something better in the future. They may not enjoy the best things in life, but the point is that they enjoy whatever they have.”

Regret is the one thing that poisons the well called Life and complicates what is already quite difficult. Every day we face millions of decisions, where we chose different things without even thinking about it. But then we take some decisions which we have to think about. And that is where we get to choose whether we act like the first category of people or the second one. Today we are standing at the cusp of a new era where everything is changing rapidly. So when you make a business decision, you already know that in a few months’ time it will be the wrong one.  What is considered cutting edge today may be termed obsolete tomorrow. So already regret the decision even before it is made. But in personal life, it is your decisions that cause changes and not some external factors. We keep on chasing perfection in an imperfect world and more often than not end up feeling regret. So instead of choosing regret over happiness, why don’t we cherish what we have?

Afterall even the tallest sugarcane has to be crushed in order to make it into sugar just like all the other not-so-tall ones.

Photographs

It was at last a Saturday night and as I lay on my bed, tired of all the hard work I had put into the day’s work, I couldn’t help but marvel at the limitless possibilities that it brought with it. I was in a city which I had inhabited for 4 glorious years of engineering and I didn’t have to wake up the next morning to join the hubbub of my new job environment. And yet, as most such occasions go, the plans hadn’t quite worked themselves out and I was sitting on my bed wondering about those few roads not taken and reminiscing how wonderful my Saturdays used to be in what now seems like an erstwhile life.

As I sat there in my lonely room of the swanky new guest house I had just started living in, I decided to start poking around the furniture lying around in the basement of the building. There were a few large cupboards stacked haphazardly around in the basement and I found a few of the drawers unlocked. I found a bunch of old family albums in there. Naturally, I started looking through them. The first one I picked up was a wedding album. I immediately deduced that the wedding had happened in the early 80’s and it was a bong wedding. I kept looking through the albums one after the other, the wedding pictures gave way to the birth of their first girl child then her achievements as she grew up, then the arrival of a baby boy, the photo of a proud father with his son holding a trophy of some sort, the graduations and finally the more recent ones of the wedding of their daughter.

By the time I put away the last album, I realized that I had spent more than an hour looking at pictures of complete strangers. Even though I felt a little guilty about invading someone’s privacy, I couldn’t help but feel a sort of connection to those people in the photographs. I started to feel a wave of nostalgia washing over me and I began to draw similarities with my own family albums. In fact I could remember a few of the same exact photos from my family as I had just seen. Here I was sitting in a barely lit room, soaking in my sweat and yet I wanted to sit there and contemplate how my life has been.

As I returned to my room, I wondered how the recent technological changes have affected our lives today. I remember an incident from a few days ago when my mother asked me to go to the nearest studio and get some photos in a USB printed out and I told her what a waste of money that whole exercise was since we already has the digital prints. Today with the advent of smartphones, digital cameras have become accessible to each and every one. Just click it and store it in your hard drive. We keep increasing the size of our photos folders and keep snapping away, but how many times do we really open that folder and look at the old photos stored there? And even when we do, we don’t really get washed over with nostalgia. And if by some technical error, if the hard disk crashes and you lose all your photos, you fret over it for like an hour and then you move on after promising yourself to keep the backup next time. I remember what a catastrophe it used to be in our household when just one picture went missing.

I believe that even though the digitization of photographic process has greatly benefitted us in terms of convenience and accessibility, they have inexplicably managed to drastically diminish the feelings attached to said photographs. They have managed to transform memories stored in our minds into megabytes.

I just visited the life of a family in just above an hour, I felt their joys with them, I was part of their important milestones, and yet I don’t even know their names, nor do I have the inclination to ever try to know them. And today I sleep with the nebulous question looming large in my subconscious: does the photographs on my computer and my mobile phone really do justice to the incredible life I have lived so far? 

The Myth of Sophistication

A few days ago I started watching Revolution. It is a series about the lives of people in a world which does not have electricity anymore. The treatment of the matter is quite macabre and it shows how the civilized people turned into clans of violent warriors who would even kill others for a very few resources. To even consider such a behavior from us ‘sophisticated’ people was a bit appalling for me. I convinced myself that what has been depicted in the show is a hyper-exaggerated version of fiction. But what I chose to ignore was that every piece of fiction derives itself from morsels of reality. Each story however fantastical it maybe, has to have some roots in truth.

It was the time of Diwali and I had gone home to visit my parents, who incidentally were invited to this function in the club with some of the other very respected and high standing people. Naturally I tagged along and it was that day that I saw how primal men can become. Everything about that evening was curt and pretentious until the dinner was served. It was the event manager’s lack of foresight which caused the food being prepared only for about 150 people while the actual headcount exceeded 400 people. The servers and waiters foresaw the epic ruckus which would ensue soon and they conveniently disappeared somewhere. And that’s when it began.

The one thing that I have mention here is that the people who come to these shindigs are generally very suave and very gentlemanly. So it was nothing short of cultural shock for me to witness the behavior of these ‘gentlemen’ later on during that fateful evening. The food was short. The few people who were fortunate enough to be first in line grabbed whatever they could and snuck away into some private cove to enjoy their spoils away from the eyes of a few hundred hungry men and women. Once the food was gone, people started getting antsy which led to a pandemonium of people breaking all decorum and raising their voices (which is considered a cardinal sin). I have never seen a container of food being so clean. People always leave some tit bits here and there, but on that day they were spic and span, almost as if no food was ever there. I watched these “sophisticated” people licking their plates and silvers. Later on as the mayhem progressed, I saw people actually snatching food from others plates. Some of the people began trading, one piece of tandoori roti for a chicken piece and so on.

That whole night was not infuriating for me (as many people later described it) but rather amusing. It was a prime example of an aberration in human anthropology. Since the advent of civilization, people have found it necessary to portray their best behavior in public. We hide behind the veil of expensive suits and nice ties whenever we are going for something important, just to trick the others into thinking we are evolved social beings devoid of any primal urges. We try to live every day in denial of the fact that we humans, like any other animal are slaves to our basal instincts. Even Maslow’s theory of needs supports this argument. We advocate to anyone who would listen to our advice to be themselves, yet we ourselves live a life of concealment and deceit. Isn’t it a bit hypocritical?

So why don’t we not be ashamed of being a savage? The reasons are far more complex than simple logic. The above view is nihilistic and unrealistic. The very basis of our society and the civilization are those lies and deceits and in order to maintain the order and harmony, we have to follow those rules. Everybody knows in their hearts what will happen when push comes to shove and things spiral out of the ‘established norms’. But until such a time comes, we put on a smile, wear nice clothes and try to keep our basal instincts at bay to maintain the dirty little secret of us “cultivated people”.

The Rain Song

It’s a rainy day and I am alone again

Now it’s a part of life, all this pain

Yet I smile at all or some

Coz I hope that girl is about to come

Rain gets stronger and nights grow longer

Watching couples run around just seems wronger

Still I choose to dance and hum

Coz I hope that girl is about to come

Now the rain is about to hit its peak

I am almost at the end of the path I seek

Still I don’t stop hoping and stay numb

Coz I still hope that girl is about to come

The rain seems to be slowly fading

All I have written on the page is the heading

I feel as if the lonely heart string is about to strum

Coz I sense that girl is about to come

Now the rain has almost come to a halt

I see a girl looking almost without a fault

I see in her a reason to lose my glum

Coz I think that my girl has finally come…

Silence

Silence is golden. This is an age old adage and has proved its veracity on many-a-occasions over the period of time since its inception. But in this modern world, some serious doubts have been cast over its pertinence. Today we live in a noisy world where everyone is out to beat their own trumpet. Every person is trying to out-blabber each other in a very vain and mild hope of being individualized. It’s a talker’s world out there and people have the tendency to talk and miss hearing everything that may be important.

Listening, once touted as a skill in itself, has now been rendered the inconsequential sidekick of the real clincher – oration. In fact the people who have good listening skills are thought to be losers and are metaphorically placed at the back of the class, while all those loudmouthed dimwits adorn the front rows.

Do you remember the last time silence between a two people sitting alone wasn't uncomfortable? There is a constant need in us to fill up the void of vulnerability with vacuous gibber-jabber. All of this has led us to a point where each one of us is trying to find out that one person with whom we can be comfortably silent. That one person with whom you don’t really have to talk to communicate. Finding that person has become a pain in the ass job in this raucous world.

When those guys came up with the adage, they were onto something. Silence can be a golden as it gives the listener time to ponder and can also be used as a psychological manipulation tactic. I am not saying that one must vow to remain silent always, just that people today need to listen to what others are saying too.

Sometimes it is good to enjoy the music rather than listening to the lyrics. There was a reason why movies like Barfi, where both the leads were deaf and dumb, attract such huge crowds. Everybody yearns for a little silence. And its not like all of us should become good listeners, otherwise who would do the talking? But every now and then, when the mutinous child inside you rebels, just use common sense because a single silent moment in a pandemonium is worth cherishing.