Can you hear me?

Alice R.D-Ramnani
2 min readJul 9, 2021

How window shopping spun me into a mini-crisis

Photo by kyle smith on Unsplash

I recently came across this book title whilst shopping for a friends birthday gift. I was adamant about finding her a book called Silence in the age of noise.

This book had followed me around the globe.

I saw it at the airport in Hong Kong

It saw me at a book fair in Brooklyn

I saw it again in Piccadilly Circus

We finally greeted each other at the Strand book shop

After getting acquainted I hid for a few days

This book helped me question my relationship with noise and information consumption. I started to enjoy sounds more.

  • Birds talk a lot of shit in the morning
  • Dogs argue a lot about who should pee on what pole
  • Microwaves scream in pain when they cook your rice
  • Doors sing songs when they squeak to inform the other doors someone is coming into the belly of the building

I wanted to get this for my friend who is struggling with building a better relationship with the noise around her.

On my way to find this book, I found two things.

  1. A dyslexic shopping for a book is a real-life short film horror movie

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