It is remarkable how much the world changes when peace abounds. When there is no attention required to be given to responsibilities immediately. When there are no limits within which chores need to be attended to. When you do not have to go anywhere, to respond, to answer.

When all that is required is to sit and listen to the silence. Listen to silence ? Yes ! it has a sound. A sound because other sounds can be heard above it. I hear the heart pound, my breath breathe, my fingers rustle and the mind that thinks inwardly but can be heard in large volume.

Delighted to be in such environs. Suddenly the tab of the keys sound ecstatic - they form words coming from the mind that is in state of exhilaration. Many argue differently. Not always does the mind do well when in solitude. Many minds function when in the midst of the extreme.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet and his famous soliloquy - ‘to be or not to be, that is the question..’ visualized written and performed, with the principal sitting by himself on the outskirts and ramparts of his palace and fort, by the river, in contemplation. Many a great director and stage performer have been challenged in their skills on how best to deliver this moment of dramatic virtuosity.

But the Russians defied and changed it. In their film version of the masterpiece, they put Hamlet in the middle of a boisterous ballroom; festive, rambunctious and cacophonous and denied him the ability of speech. Made him walk through this motley vociferous and raucous congregation, ruminating, as the words of that most well heard and remembered oration, played as an off sound, symbolically demonstrating the state of his mind without him announcing it. Absolutely, the most brilliant piece of cinema and indeed the most brilliant interpretation of this loved and most dramatic moment in theatre history.

We may get our best thoughts while walking through a crowded street. While phaffing with a group of colleagues. Or in solitary silence.

I am not or may not be getting my best thoughts right now as I sit in relative silence away from the bustle of home and city. But I have the opportunity and the ability to recognize it. That is gain. My gain. It will build me and become me. It will be an asset in my existence.

The day has been spent in doing just that. Listening to the silence and allowing it to penetrate me. To fill me in its near orgasmic quality. To reveal to me its variations and different positions. To embrace me in its warmth and to bring me to a cataclysmic exhausting end,of a weak and listless being.

Silence does this to people.

I stare before me on the table at books marked with some reference - Churchill, Heath, Blair, Presidents.

Why leadership in a Hotel room ??

But then why not ?? Could be there to break the silence. Politics often does that to society.

My love, never in solitude or silence, but in abundant volume -

Amitabh Bachchan