Noise

Noise is always a cause of nuisance it may be that unwanted sound you never wished to hear or it may be the frustratingly disorganized and random pool of data which fails to make sense even after all the modifications you could wish to apply has been applied or even worse it could remind you of your handicap.

The human brain is the center of the central nervous system which controls all the lower order unconscious activities and also the higher order conscious activities. The brain has different sectors or departments assigned to the perception of sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell and equilibrium, these departments are kind of water tight compartments but if one gets damaged the other one tries to substitute for it by becoming more active but it could never replace it. It is this property of brain which makes unfortunate souls like mine who were born with a deficient visual cortex of the brain to not only feel the world around us but to also see it.

I was born on August 27^th 1984, I was born blind . I remember my first birthday it was just another normal day, black. How is a one year old blind boy supposed to know if a day is different from others which he had spent seeing a single shade of grey, the darkest one. Sound, well those who could see this text could very well create a world using only different sounds the chirping of birds, the sound of flowing water, the sound of fresh air brushing the trees would paint a picture which could bee seen even without using the eyes, my mind is also capable of painting the picture but only one colour is used. I know what is the sound of a bird, sound of flowing water and of wind brushing the trees, what I don’t know is the image to associate with each of these sounds all these seem to come from a source which looks the same…. black.

Due to my inability of associating images with sounds all the waves reaching my auditory canal seem to originate from a single source and what I hear is a constant and unending stream of randomly arranged meaning less data or Noise. This noise contains meaningful signals, data which I want to interpret but how? How can I weave through this unending jungle when I don’t even know what I am looking for, there is nothing in this noise for me.

I am in my mom’s arm, with my eyes closed and ears open, receiving all the noise I could, those random…. Hey that’s my fathers voice, its coming from this side of me, he is not far away, I know where he is standing. If I am at the centre then he is towards this side in front of me. What is that? The continuity of black is interrupted by two specks of white one at the centre and the other towards this side and in front of the other, am I dreaming, it doesn’t matter I have never seen white dots even in my dream, something is not right my brain….. Wait a minute, is that me and my father? I could see? Then where is my mother, I could hear the sound of deep breath sandwiched in between the the low pitch groan and that loud sound that’s my mother standing right next to me. The number of dots is increasing, if this is what they call sight then I could see and I could see 28 dots randomly arranged inside a roughly rectangular shape which must be a room.

My first birthday gift changed my life . It just took me six months to form dots for cats, dogs, my dad’s Hero Honda and my choo choo train. I am two years old now and the dots are moving around I know when someone enters the room and when someone leaves it, if some one leaves the dots don’t just disappears but it changes from white to black traversing different shades of grey. I wonder why people enter and exit the room in groups?

I am five now and the number of dots have increased. They have not just increased on their own I have spent time, taking all the weeds out of the noise and recognizing and organizing what I want or more importantly rejecting what I don’t want. I spend time with the data I reject and try to take a dive into it, to extract something which is unknown to explore and to appreciate. This is an iterative process, an infinite loop.

Today is my first day at school, we have guests in the house eighty seven of them but still mom drove me to school. The teacher enters the room and introduces herself. Her voice has high pitch but it carries a dull tone, it must be difficult to teach blind children and she has twelve of us to teach poor … why did she say there are twelve of us. 1,2,3,4,5,…..128,129 why am I seeing one hundred and twenty nine dots? Let me count again. Yes thirteen in the center and hundred and sixteen of them are standing in a rectangular file. Those thirteen must be the teacher and the children then who are standing at the walls. Do we have guests in our house?

I am ten ten years old. The book I am reading contains dots I could feel them, I could see them but why are they not white each dot has a different texture and a different colour which colour is that one? Is that what they call Pink?

I am twenty and I am a tired young … am I young , I don’t feel young inside this cell. Why am I chained? I am not mad . They think that I am mad but its not me but its them who are mad, how can one live in this world, what I can see is blue, white, pink, red green grains all around where is that soothing black, at this moment I could see thirty one thousand four hundred and fifteen dots, all of different colour, this world is a mess. Now I know why I receive a constant stream of noise, the whole world is nothing but noise. Why did I change? Cant I be blind again , I don’t want the noises white pink brown and black.Why did I change?

I am twenty one and I am dead.