Of noise, mundane and divine

Last year, a friend who knows only how to make motor cars move and stop asked me to set right certain minor problems in the second hand unit...

Last year, a friend who knows only how to make motor cars move and stop asked me to set right certain minor problems in the second hand unit she had bought. My tool-kit took care of some and a mechanic nearby saw to the others. The final tightening of all visible screws on the body-work was done by his apprentice, a boy aged perhaps 10 or 11.

When I took the car back to its owner, she got in and asked me to drive around. After about a furlong she asked, too impatiently I thought, “Is the horn fixed?” I said she hadn’t told me that it needed fixing and that I had noticed nothing wrong with it as I hadn’t had cause to use it. “Press it,” she commanded. I obeyed, and the difficulty became immediately clear: I felt it in my bones. “I’m scared of the thing,” said she. “It makes me jump, and people in front of the car jump too and give me filthy looks.”

The dealer in automobile accessories was bemused. “We don’t have anything half as good, Madam. Where did you get it and what did it cost?” We asked to hear a few of the horns he had, chose one, had it fitted in place of the monstrosity, and came away with a couple of hundred rupees. The dealer must have called all his friends about the idiots who wanted a horn less loud.

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All cultures are noisy, to different degrees, when they celebrate. Drums are important not just among “primitive” tribal peoples but also when the bands of “modern” nations play at parades of their fancy weaponry. But we Indians beat everyone else hollow: we are noisy at everything we do. Our sneezes are like cannon shots and we can shut doors only by banging them. Music does not remain musical when we play it. I stopped going to the cinema years ago because every “upgrade” of equipment meant yet more decibels.

A friend from abroad, a fellow researcher in anthropology 30 years ago, visited me recently. He is also a fellow unbeliever. “Is god deaf?” he asked. “Are gods and goddesses deaf?” he asked, to take into account polytheism and gender equality.

Since at least the early 1970s, temples, mosques and gurudwaras have used loudspeakers, not just on special occasions but routinely and even late into the night. They keep babies from sleeping and are hell for people old or ill. Students cannot concentrate because of them. But religion may not be criticised, nor anything supposedly associated with it. Only they can dare to speak against the “religious” who are prepared to have sacred daggers stuck into them. And religion is held to be so far above the laws of humankind — never mind that it is itself a creation of humankind — that anyone may describe anything as religious.

We have a law about noise pollution. But then we also have laws about dowry, cruelty to animals, female foeticide, not cutting trees, corruption, communal harmony. Can we not make an unholy racket when we break all those other laws with such panache?