My daily commute to office is a dreary affair, gobbles up 20% of out of home - in office time. The sounds of everyday offer nothing new and nothing really shakes you up in the time you spend traveling. It might be the scraggly beggars or the bold eunuchs or the honking honchos who think decibel is a credible solution to a traffic wipe out.
I find it fascinating to listen to the auto drivers and pretend to understand their stories. While you have the "I want a star inside my auto" drivers there are other who believe in driving a spartan existence.
Today was one such sample. While Vijayakumar (aka the spartan driver) was negotiating a turn suddenly I was kicked by a sound that appeared to be a cross between an emergency siren and almost the sound of chirp.
Something is awry, I thought. I checked my "usually dumb" smartphone to see if it had chosen to emit sounds, after being silent from the day it was possessed. That not being the case, I triangulated (the third point of this triangulation is day dreaming, which is not a skill I possess) that the auto must be experiencing a snag, so I asked Vijayakumar. You have various spectrum of people who want to model their horn-sound on their characters, their likings, their songs. Left to me I would put a horn that would say "Hat jaa M#^$%jaat" in an escalating crescendo.
Back to the auto ride, Vijayakumar informed me that this was a sound of a bird, obviously marred by the cheap electronics of his auto. Why would someone put the sound of bird - I asked. He said that this was the sound of a sparrow. Sparrow - the relic of our immediate past - that somehow vanished from our daily existence. The sound of this past was something unexpected. Even if its a surprise (which it is intended to be), it does not quite convey what I felt then.
V added - with a confidence that indicated he must know his stuff well - "You can only find sparrows in villages". "These towers kill them". When I asked them what towers (buildings or something else) , as if correcting a wayward child, he said "Cell phone towers, what else". The power emitted by them (at those frequencies, I am assuming) kill sparrows.
If you want to see sparrows - go to Bangalore International Airport. Sparrows - the closest definition of a chirp, long dead in our ears.
