It’s a tall order to ask for meat without bones, and tea without leaves — Tibetan saying.
Solitude begins where the market place ends — Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
 
It has often happened that many a concerned visitor from overseas has enquired of me how in the midst of so much noise we in India could still consider silence to be a desirable value at all. Turn wherever we might, except perhaps in the very lonely stretches of the higher Himalayas or in the profoundly hostile sunburned wastes of the Rann of Kutch, where by very virtue of the terrain, solitude and silence are forced in upon the human mind, one cannot easily experience silence—in the sense of total lack of sound—and solitude—in the sense of absence of other human company.  We are so much people, and we appear to love noise so dearly! Nevertheless as a spiritual-minded people we have always extolled the virtues of silence and solitude as well down through the ages. This always would appear as a contradiction to the non-Indian no doubt. Do we account for this contradiction? Do we take responsibility to reflect on this at all? Do we need to, in the final analysis?
 
Is it that we in India have changed so much that we have spirited ourselves off from the path that those wise ones trod once? I do not wish to propose to be able to answer such a conundrum. No one can, I guess. Because of the inexhaustibility of life that propels us off our feet when we are so dismally unaware ourselves. However somewhere deep inside myself I feel that these apparent contradictions are only apparent and seen on the outside! Once we break in to the inner levels the oppositions cease to be and things get sorted out easily. Yes, noise is there on the outside, and may well have existed for ages. We are a lot of people indeed and we seem to love such a noisy world. And yet we worship silence and solitude! Perhaps in the very contradiction truth lurks. Only in the noise can one seek silence, only amidst the crowd can one seek solitude.
 
There are so many people in the Indian subcontinent and our living spaces are so cramped and limited in comparison with the some of the western countries. In Sweden for instance you could walk for a long time on exquisitely maintained town-roads and still not meet with any one human being for miles and miles on end. Space and time appear so different there. So healthy and crisp the air. One suddenly feels so wealthy and wise. One finds so much time and space at one’s disposal and one could also suddenly feel so desperately lonely. On the other hand, the moment one lands back in India, the market place begins and solitude and silence end. For one who is used to the noise and polluted air of the market place there is no other heaven as being back home and the feeling of belonging. There is a tale that goes like this:

A flower seller in the town had a friend who lived beside the sea and was a fisherwoman. Once she visited her friend after a hard day’s work. The friends kept awake a long time in to the night talking, laughing and sharing jokes.  However, when the time came to sleep the poor flower seller could not sleep for the stench in the hut! Somehow she tossed and turned all through the rest of the night and bid adieu to her friend the next day. It must have been a real welcome treat for her to be back amidst the sweet smelling flower filled home. Now, it so happened that her friend returned her visit one day. Of course they were delighted to meet each other and shared their dinner with equal delight. When the time came to sleep the poor fisher woman found it so terrible to be amidst the strong smell of flowers that she could hardly breathe. What is fragrance, what is stench? What the flower seller cherished the fisherwoman could not tolerate. Very late into the night she decided to drag the basket of unsold fish into the room. The pure stench of dry fish crept into the room slowly and put her to a lovely sleep.