CELEBRITY COLUMN: Silence, writes Ayushmann Khurrana

Have you ever heard the sound of silence? It sounds like 59 infant bees humming in a chorus. Like a choir. Sans any harmonies and seconds and sopranos. Silence is mandatory in libraries. But I’m the kind of person who likes to talk in libraries and be silent in coffee shops. Silence is mandatory in hospitals. But I want to scream like a newborn infant when I see a newborn infant screaming like a newborn infant.

Silence is precious. It aids observation. You may be intelligent and wise, and even if you’re not, it definitely gives a facade of intelligence and wisdom. It’s a kind of a cover-up and hides a lot. It’s good for the wise and even better for the foolish. At the same time, silence screams a lot. It’s noisy, but never cacophonous. Like sounds, silences too have varied characters. I like the silence of a dubbing studio. Unlike the silence of a dark room without electricity.

You don’t have to express your love and affection through words. Just pure silence and that earnestness in the eyes says a lot. In acting, too, silences require more dexterity in your craft. Words camouflage your acting prowess. Silence shows the real mettle.

Silent films look unique. The Artist and Pushpak are a class apart. And how can we forget the famous one from The Notebook, “We sit silently and watch the world around us. This has taken a lifetime to learn. It seems only the old are able to sit next to one another and not say anything and still feel content. The young, brash and impatient, must always break the silence.”

“It is a waste, for silence is pure. Silence is holy. It draws people together because only those who are comfortable with each other can sit without speaking. This is the great paradox.”

Words make things so finite. The unsaid, the unspoken, the unwritten — basically, silence has infinite possibilities. Since filmmakers essentially build a film out of nothing, compiling raw footage, sound effects, dialogue, and music to form a visual story, it might be difficult to recognise that what we don’t put in a film is just as important (if not more) as what we do. The silence used in the climax of the film Sairat completely underlined and defined the film. There were lot of moments in Dum Laga Ke Haisha as well where Sandhya and Prem used silences to express love, hate, regret and victory (towards the end).

On the flip side, what if your partner is silent in bed — no sound, no expression — and you don’t even get to know when he/she orgasms. That can be catastrophic. Just the sounds of lovemaking are enough to turn you on. It should be the right mix of coyness and expressiveness in bed. The right amount of sound. Just like silence in Quakerism. Silence in worship consists of participants (no longer necessarily Quakers today) sitting in a circle at a private home or agreed place in “meeting.” There is no church, no minister, no ritual, liturgy, or recitation. Usually set for about an hour, anyone may speak if so moved, but the expectation is that any vocalisation, which is not frivolous. Let the sound be worth the effort. Speak up when required.

As Martin Luther King Jr rightly said, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”