Cough: The Noise of Politeness

I am the kind of person who hates noise, not all noise, only unnecessary noise. By unnecessary, I mean noise that I personally find disturbing. For example, making noise while eating or drinking, vehicle’s horn in traffic etc. You might be wondering why I am so particular about noise. Let me share a small experience that changed the way I look at it and made me rethink my perspective.

After joining MCA, I really don’t know how time flew. The first internals arrived so quickly. We MCA students were supposed to write our exams in the MBA block, where each bench can have two students, one each from MCA and MBA. In total, there were four rows of benches, and I was seated on the third bench in the first row, along with a guy from MBA.

It was winter and winter in Bengaluru, of course, means students with health issues keep coughing. As I mentioned earlier, I don’t like unnecessary noise, and all this coughing kept irritating me.

After sometime, at one moment, I heard a noise, a noise of someone coughing. That was exactly from my right. I just turned to my right, there was a girl with a bit of curly hair, wearing red and black formals with shoes, with red lipstick, sitting exactly next to my bench. When I saw her she coughed again. Her coughing was like: it's a pattern where she coughs two times at once, which was so polite. I mean, “how can someone cough so politely?” Especially someone like me finds it polite. She coughed again like that a couple of times and I felt strangely calm, as if someone had played my favorite song. With all these things in my mind, I was writing my exam.

Now she was coughing like once in a minute and after sometimes, when she coughed, some boys at the backbenches also started to cough. I was like, "Bro, what's going on?" To be honest, when those boys cough, I felt that same unnecessary noise vibe. I don't know why. Is she really coughing politely or is it because of, you know, our men always used to say "men will be men". Really I don't know. But that was really a special experience, and that day, I realized sometimes even unnecessary noise can be addictive haha.