When faced with reticent response to my posers, I further prod,
‘Itna sannata kyun hai bhai?’(Why this eerie silence?) In the Hindi film
‘Sholay’, the visually challenged Imam queries so of his villagers who
turn silent on seeing the body of his teenage son, brutally killed by the
dacoit, Gabbar Singh. The legendary line came to the fore, on the passing away
of A K Hangal, the actor who played the Imam…
Indeed
it is necessary for us to ask the question every time an eerie silence becomes our
reaction to a challenging stimulus. In the realm of the disquieting quiet lies
the spectrum of fear born of imagined implications. We fear that we could meet
an undesirable fate and hence we slink into a silence that submerges our ability
to respond.
Silence
cannot be golden, when speech is necessary. In the film, the Imam is
visually challenged and hence he connects through his hearing ability. The
absence of babble buries his receptivity to what is happening around.
Conversely for us, often when we shut our mouths, we are actually numbing our
senses to the scene that surrounds us.
The
poet saint Kabir sung about ‘yeh murdon ka gaon’ (this is the village of the
dead). Do we play dead to the brutalization of lives around? Do we stay silent
to the crimes against humanity? Do we turn to stone when the need is one of
dynamic response? When the questions are of life and verve, is our reaction one
of deathly silence? Surely, to be better at living, we need to be responsive.
Speaking up is the way to break the eerie silence.
Why the eerie silence? Choose to speak up…
BE BETTER at resisting the urge to give up!
- Pravin K. Sabnis
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