Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Silence is Gold!

Photo courtesy: The WWW

I remember my first few days in the USA. Eerie!!

I could hear my own breath, my stomach churning, neighbor snoring, cat meowing somewhere, an ambulance, someone arguing loud and all kinds of sounds that you normally don't even think of !

It was a scary feeling.

After living here for a while now, I am so used to this 'Silence' and in fact feel threatened whenever I visit India. It's is terribly noisy! I request my parents to talk in a lower voice and they laugh at me. My friends make fun of me when I ask them why they are shouting !

I yell at my friends when they frequently honk in their cars/bikes. I curse other motorists who honk for no reason ! I even go out and scare away stray dogs ..that bark through the night in the neighborhood.

Today I experienced NOISE in the USA for the first time.

I was waiting at Dublin-Pleasanton BART station and my God..it was terrible. This particular BART station sits right on I-580 FREEWAY, in fact it's the median between East and West bound lanes of I-580 at Pleasanton. Terrible is not the word. It was so annoying. I felt totally out of place.

I was so glad when the train came and the doors closed. It was all quiet again !!

SILENCE IS GOLD !

2 comments:

Kishan said...

I too find the noisy atmosphere a little strange whenever I go to India. But, I get adjusted to it and from the second day everything seems normal. Once a desi..always a desi

Balaji S Rajan said...

Silence is gold! I like to be silent many times. Silence is powerful and you gain more energy. There is a pleasure in remaining silent and observing silence. You can hear more during silence. I have started hating people who want to be loud. There is lot of beauty in silence.