He who screams the loudest...

    My cycle of buying televisions seem to be curiously tied to elections. I bought my second-last because I did not want to miss out on the best TV America has to offer-- election campaigns and debates. I bought my last TV just in time to be able to catch up on the Indian election coverage.
    And I'm thinking it might be enough to put me off TV news for forever, because coverage as of now seems to be a blur of people trying to outscream each other, blatant and crude favoritism and poor anchoring rolled in a mind numbing capsule, punctuated by a host who typically tries to outshout them all.
    I have always had a problem with too much noise. Screaming, loud music, hysterics, honking, dancing, dirty neighbourhood fights -- whenever decibels go unnecessarily over acceptable limits I get uncomfortable. I am not very proud of it, but sometimes I just flee.
    That is not to say I don't go to movies or clubs-- I do. But movies are a controlled environment, as are clubs.
   The few times I do go out I still take many breaks to go out and clear my head, much to the annoyance of my friends. Anyway, the point of this long digression is that I am simply not well equipped to handle unnecessarily loud noise, including ma on the phone.
    And then I landed in Bombay. I am extremely happy with the city on many levels, but I doubt I'll ever fully come to terms with the constant noise. That made me begin to wonder, why do we love noise so much?
    Bombay might be an extreme, but we as a people are noisy. Just peep into our classrooms, canteens or even toilets. There's this one junction in Kolkata just near a famous university where ambient noises hit such horrifying levels  no normal person should be exposed to them. Yet, being close to the university, this crossroad is also a popular adda spot -- the young and the old hang out there day after day.
    Sure, habit is a big leveler. It would be dishonest of me to say all the noise bothered me as much three years ago as it does me now, but I've never really been able to figure out this love of it.
    I told you, I've always disliked too much loudness, the reason for many a cold war between ma and me. I had at one point stopped calling her more than once a week because she won't stop yelling into the phone. That might sound too rude to you, but desperate times call for desperate measure. She talks normally on the phone now. Disclaimer: please don't stop talking to family because of this anecdote. Try asking before you do it. ;-)
    So we talk loudly, we watch TV loudly, we drive loudly, we eat loudly, our movies and TV shows are loud and come with too much background music and distractions.
Even our leaders seem to gain popularity on the basis of who can bray the loudest.
When I was in school, they came out with a movie called "Taal". You remember it for the songs, I remember it also for the scene where the hero, without raising his voice one bit, silences a raving man and proves his point. If there is one thing Akshaye Khanna should be proud of  in his acting career it should be for carrying off "maine aapse 10 zyada glass todey, toh kya mera sach aap ke sach se bada ho gaya?"
 Go check it out.
    So what is it that makes us love noise so much? Especially when we all seem to appreciate quietness when we can get it?
    Almost everyone I know here thinks Prannoy Roy is the best anchor we have on TV now and the man seldom raises his voice.
    In school my friends and I were decidedly more scared of the teacher who never raised her voice than we were of the teacher who would scream at us every single day. Fun fact: we also took her more seriously than said yeller. And she got more Teachers' Day cards too.
    We all laugh at saas-bahu background noises, but won't try and control our own voices while yakking in the canteen. We will put up pictures with hastags like #silenceisgolden #serenity and other similar words and phrases when we go on vacations, but once home we instinctively turn our TVs to the 50s in volume, without bothering to check if we need to at all.
    We insist music must be blaring to be able to enjoy it. We will yell across the store aisle for our lost friend instead of just trying to walk a few steps and check if they're just round the corner. We will yell even if the person is standing right next to us.
     I'm not propagating library standard quiet everywhere, I love talking too much for that. But why can't we all be a little quieter, please?
 


 
    See? That's the sound of silence. There's a reason they wrote a song about it. Which sounds sweetest when played in moderate volume.