For a very long time I believed that words have the ability to express everything… everything that we feel, see, touch and everything that we can sense. For a long time, I believed that words are the beginning of a solution, if not the solution itself. For a long time I prided myself in being able to communicate my thoughts succinctly and making the other person believe in every single word that I used.
Lately though, there has been a rebellion. The thoughts in my mind have been rebelling against the words I choose to express them in. The multitude of thoughts is so humongous that my vocabulary has been failing time and again to express what I think, what I feel and largely what I believe. There is a war… inside my head. My thoughts feel betrayed by the chosen language of my brain and I have severe headaches as I try to come to terms with the complete system failure of one thing I thought I knew and understood-words.
Imagine a situation where you are arguing with someone trying to make them see your point of view. Isn’t there an oxymoron hidden underneath this statement? If someone were able to see your point of view then it would be not be his or her point of view. It would be yours. Words only add on to the illusion of making you believe that someone can see your point of view. Words are deceptive. They are cloaked in the garb of intellect, perceived thought and what not. We think that words express a reality but they don’t. They just help in weaving an illusion so that reality can remain untouched, virginal and raw.
Words are like the chimera or the temptation that mesmerizes, titillates and leaves you halfway making you pant for more. Words have a mystery around them that you have to solve, to understand and to try and reach to the darkness…to the core of that hidden part that only modesty can cover. When words are stripped of their magic, when the glow of the neon light in the night is overpowered by the morning light, what remains is reality- banal, boring but always there. Reality, in the true sense of the word is the wife. Always there.
Words work with an underlying assumption: that there is a listener who is listening to those words; that there is a reader who is reading those words. But what if that assumption is not true? The result is a lot of cacophony where everyone is trying to speak. And there is no one to listen. The more you talk, the more noise you make and the final result is a complete breakdown of any possibility of a solution. Words are just that…words.
If words could provide a solution, lesser number of friendships would disintegrate, lesser hearts would break, the statistics for divorces might just look better and history would be devoid of all wars. Fact of the matter is dialogue never works because we all have our individual monologues playing in our heads. We all have our own story to tell. We are all victims in our stories. We are all heroes in our stories. And often times, when we try and narrate our story to someone else, what we receive is not a sympathetic ear but a pronounced judgement of our characters, of the choices we have made and the way we have lived our lives.
And for that reason, lately, silence is a way of life that I am suddenly attracted to. The pointlessness of an argument or a fight or an explanation has led me to find another way. The more I grow up, the more I realize the importance of that unnamed thing: silence. Not talking is so much better than thinking that this is what I should have said or this is what I should say. Words are all about salesmanship but if I decide not to put myself up in the market for sale then I don’t need them. Or I need them only to satiate a superficial craving like I have when I need a piece of chocolate.
Not to say that I am reaching Nirvana but maybe it is an effort to put an end to the noise in my head. Maybe to put an end to the war that is raging inside. Or maybe to find the silence that can express what I feel right now.
I don’t know if I have been able to put in words what I wanted to say. Maybe we should talk. Or then again, maybe not…
Roopal Kewalya is a film graduate from NID, Ahmedabad and has been an active independent writer for television, short films and even song lyrics for various organizations. She has also had short stints as a stage actor, a radio jockey for FMII and loves to dabble in all things creative.
WOW!