Where is the SILENCE?

DISCLAIMER: This post is chiefly a rant. No offence to those who may take any.

Sahyadri. The name gives birth to a thousand different reactions at different times, but every time it’s the same feeling that blooms and causes these reactions- I’m still unsure of how to describe the feeling and am reluctant to give it a name as such but if I were to do so, it would probably be apprehension. After all, it’s Sahyadri- the school for those who couldn’t put up with the average humans.

Pardon me if I sound too smug while saying this but, after Sahyadri the human society of the ‘outside’ world seems too petty and bland. It’s ironic, considering how Sahyadri has all the disadvantages in terms of ‘décor’ and ‘frills’ of the kind. But the society seems too concerned about the mechanical and not-human-but-robotic world that they don’t know how to go back to being human again. Weird, considering how we’re going to have to find a new name for the man race soon enough.

An instance, in my life was just a few weeks ago at school. My batch went for a walk downhill during the night; this is something the batch loves to do and enjoys thoroughly. So once we reached a favorable position, we all sat down and then decided to lie down to look at the stars silently. It was no moment of enlightenment or self-reflection, just warmth and silence. But then, we hear the not-so-human humans blasting their speakers from probably 10 kilometers or something, yet it sounded very distinct. It disrupted the peace. On top of that, to annoy us further, the humans constantly kept trying to run over us with their huge monstrous vehicles while we laid down.

Maybe I’m exaggerating a bit but the feeling of frustration cause was way over.

The other day, while one of our teachers was asking us to ‘maintain silence’, my friend leans in and whispers into my ear, ‘We can’t maintain it, if there’s none in the first place.’ I was amused and it got me thinking. What my friend said was true. There is no silence. The peace on that day of the batch walk was merely a glimpse of what it would be like to stay away from these hazardous and bugging environments that are making us so unlike ourselves and our ancestors.

After returning to the soon-to- be- inhuman society, I feel as if some sort of eternal force was trying to communicate with me all this while and trying to tell me what the world could have been if not this ‘screen’ had overwhelmed us so greatly.

One last instance of the humans’ disdain toward the awesomeness (exaggeration alert) of Sahyadri-like environments and nature was just a few days ago when I talked to a friend after a long time. One of the first questions she asked me was, ‘How did you live so long without anything?’ Through this, she was referring to the fact that we have very less access to internet (none to the junior grades) and the screen or basically the worldly pleasures. I was quite surprised since that was something I hadn’t ever thought of. How did I? How, when so many other people are committing suicides because of online games, and are distraught without the screen in their lives, am I still respiring normally with no regrets or mental illnesses? (I hope).

Well, there are many answers to the question depending how you look at it. One could be, that I’m some sort of a mutant who’s immune to these trends. But since that’s highly unlikely, we’ll cut that off.

Another possibility and the most likely one, is that the since screen in Sahyadri was substituted with other things that didn’t make me inhuman- books, writing, playing, even talking.

It’s a sort of acclimatization, a kind of getting-used-to. It’s like over there everyone’s a new person, like a rebirth- like we never had those iPhones or iMacs, because after all, you can’t really miss what you never had, right?