Every morning, when we should be listening to the white-throated thrush, we hear instead a manic mix of MS’s suprabhatam with Ayyappa bhajans and paeans to Mariamma, all at different pitches, and all distorted by illegal cone speakers.
Most of the speakers are turned outward, so that the perpetrators within the building can listen to the cricket scores or whisper into their cell phones while their pious clamour blares as far as the next panchayat. The intent is not to inspire the devotees who came to worship at the crack of dawn but to punish the heathens who stayed in bed.
Our protests signify nothing. In all the places we’ve lived in, the police are too afraid to enforce decibel limits. They ask us to settle the matter ourselves. Or they claim these extra-loud speakers are used with permission. Or they ask, as one jolly Delhi cop did, “Why don’t you also jwine?”
No one dares take on religious noise, and even private parties and music concerts are sacrosanct. Year after year, kutcheri pandals are put up next to hospitals, and sublime ragas are turned into screeches from cheap audio systems manned by young thugs.
They look blankly at anyone who pleads with them to turn it down, even the organisers paying for the speakers. That’s because they are all stone deaf.
Since laws and policemen don’t work, perhaps we ought to tackle those audio geniuses directly. I’m not saying we kill them outright; just send them far away, to Mars maybe, where there are apparently lakes and rivers and lettuce beds now.
Or maybe we, the aurally sensitive, ought to book our tickets to another planet. There’s no other way to flee the speakers, the musical horns, the unsilenced autos, the neighbour’s booming televisions, and the school bus that honks for 10 continuous minutes because someone’s brats are late again.
Meanwhile, we close our windows, wishing we had glazed them with thicker glass. We use earplugs, which don’t fit as snugly as we’d like. We long for power cuts. We price noise-cancelling headphones online. But mostly we go quietly insane.
But seriously...
Install thicker glass in your windows, soundproof if possible
Preserve lush vegetation around your house
Be merciful to others. Turn down your TV and add soft furnishings to reduce echoes
Learn how to reverse a car without using an automatic horn
