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Kabeera Khada Bazaar Mein

Maange Sabki Khair

Na Kahu Se Dosti

Na Kahu Se Bair

Zero

Music, they say, is like painting with sound. Nature plays with music in its different sounds. There is a pattern, an unmistakably shrewd play of notes and tones in everything around us.

And then there is silence.

This isn’t the silence that only comes as a welcome relief after the neighbourhood loudspeakers stop blaring, or the sense of reclaimed sanity after that capped, bearded guy gives us a temporary respite.

This is soundlessness in general.

To say that there is music in silence would probably be too abstract an assertion and it does contradict how music is classically defined. But then, aren’t art forms to be felt rather than defined? Call it an extension of Aleatoric music, or a corollary to the concepts of divine silence in Zen Buddhism; when there is no commotion around, that is when you speak to yourself. What can be sweeter?

With time, this is becoming a rarer and hence all the more precious a pleasure. Away from the noise and the distractions, a little spell of calm sounds no less than Mozart or Rahman!

In popular music too, silence has been immortalized by the maverick composer John Cage with his experimental and controversial piece 4’33’’ in which the performer just sits in front of the piano or any instrument and does nothing for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. The time span actually amounts to 273 seconds and it was his tribute to the concept of absolute zero at – 273K, the theoretical freezing point of all motion.

That may have been too esoteric an effort, but in our own small ways, we can raise a toast to this purest form of auditory pleasure by probably sometimes switching off the FM monstrosities, unplugging the TV, turning the mobile off and holding our breath under a starry sky and listening to our own self.