If a sensitive long-distance microphone were to be dangled in geostationary orbit somewhere over Chattisgarh at the centre of the Subcon on a workday morning, it would pick up one noise from Asansol to Multan, from Shigatse to Matara. And that is the grating sound of metal on metal, of steel shutters being pulled up in a clanging, raspy, bone-shattering noise that sends the heart racing and leaves the brain terror-stricken.
If a sensitive long-distance microphone were to be dangled in geostationary orbit somewhere over Chattisgarh at the centre of the Subcon on a workday morning, it would pick up one noise from Asansol to Multan, from Shigatse to Matara. And that is the grating sound of metal on metal, of steel shutters being pulled up in a clanging, raspy, bone-shattering noise that sends the heart racing and leaves the brain terror-stricken.
It is a terrible experience that is repeated tens of millions of times at shopfronts and housefronts, in markets and residential neighbourhoods, all over. Only South Asian onomatopoeia can approximate the downing (or upping) of a shutter; it is a frightful ghatghatghat-dhaddhad-dhad-dhyang! An uncultured reverberation that is as remote from modern day sophistication as it is removed from any arena of South Asia's past.
It is yet to be recognised — the mental trauma suffered by the hundreds of millions of South Asia's teeming billion every morning and evening as shutters clang open and bang shut in a continuous line right along the Grand Trunk Road to Peshawar, up its innumerable offshoots and feeder roads and their innumerable offshoots and feeder gullies. How many of us turn into serial killers and/or corrupt contractors as a result of the upping and downing of shutters day in and day out?