Solitude. Something that was abundant in childhood. Now I am helpless because it is hard to come by and twice as elusive if you wish to seek it. There are times and then there are places. We travel across them to find solace. But fellow travelers travel for reasons. For them travel is the mindless boredom till destination. Something to be filled with the routine of everyday. Mobile phone speakers blare out songs. Kids with their plastic mobiles that croaks the same tune no matter which button is depressed. Laptops with movies and movies with endless background scores. Life no longer a single track audio. Each track playing over another. Stacking noise, creating composite commotion.

Much for the mind to decipher, forfeit comes easy. There’s so much to unstack. Too much to comprehend. The shallow and benign are devious. Entrapping in it’s lure to scour beyond the obvious. Blanking out is harder. Electronic chaos is designed to infiltrate. The pitch, the tone, the use of silence to lay low and ambush. Techniques need not be sophisticated. To chip at the citadel of solitude even the crude implements seems polished.

Familiar circumstances are worse. Silence of sound is drowned by commotion of thoughts. Can’t escape from the clatter of the restless mind. Toddler within demands constant company even if characters need to be trans-located or invented. Characters in place next settings are conjured. Script comes alive. Dialogues flow. Dialogue must flow. No awkward pauses in this realm. Characters sitting without speaking would be such a shameful waste. Waste, we have been told, is criminal. When time is money and money is everything then whiling flirts exile. Sub-conscious has been altered. Imagination re-tuned. Mute is hardly pressed. It’s there but realized only to favour one commotion over another. Never the end. Just an inconvenient and neglected means.

My mute…where dost thou lie?

6th March, 2014. Mumbai