Municipality elections are this weekend in Faridabad. Electric three wheelers are rampaging the streets, with loudspeakers blaring slogans and songs composed around the candidates elevating them to statuses of Gods and Prophets. There are no election speeches, no meetings, no visits of candidates to people’s homes, no tea drinking ceremonies, no active pamphleteering, no writing of witty slogans on walls and no manifesto of promises. We are only to vote for contestants by listening to hagiographic songs; it is expected that our allegiance to the candidate should only be out of an attraction or attachment that one feels for some unseen guru or deity. The deification of electoral candidates and the exercise of the voters’ choices based on principles of devotion has taken the democratic and secular space to the private and sacred. Such is the prognosis of democracy as it succeeds, and should not be seen as its failure, though the sacred is a contradiction of democracy, which must, at the cellular level, be secular. And this huge transformation of democracy from the secular to the sacred is achieved through the power of the sound, namely the loudspeaker.

I was watching a movie on OTT in which the police in an American town busts a drug racket because of loud music emanating from a building beyond midnight. This is unthinkable in India since blaring despicable noise on mics is the assertion of one’s existential rights in the public space. The big cars, enclosing pavements, hawking on streets, closing off roads with pandals for parties are seen as an assertion of rights to be equal to anybody else and thus placing into inequality slot numerous citizens by disturbing the everyday routine of their work. Authorities throw their weight by putting up roadblocks and traffic barriers. Sound belongs to this category, of claiming and occupying the public space. Music is played by puja pandals, or in Jagran lay such claims on space. Sound boxes up space, marks it out through its field of amplitude, contains it, conquers it. War drums, battle cries, drum beat for announcements, are targeted at space and all those who inhabit that space. Sound overpowers, it turns humans into passive receivers, louder the sound is, more it captures the senses of the person.

Sound seemingly falls into the same category as the spectacle. It may be said to be the poor man’s spectacle, it is boisterous, it imposes, closes public space and wraps up human attention till in gasps of breath. Like the spectacle it unifies by eliminating any nuance of a counter sound, it silences because it deafens.

I have just reached Kolkata to the blaring mics at our local temple on Shiv Ratri. Since the past five decades that I recall that come a Saraswati Puja, or a Kali Puja and now of late the Shiv Ratri and Jagaddhatri, mics have mercilessly blared. As it happens, those exams fall close to these festivals and there are always some who are old or sick or both and the sound expectedly disturbs them. Later as I emerged in my teens and some kind of social awakening, I realized that the sound was meant and targeted to disturb us, the “bhadraloks” or the “residents” (basinda) as the slum would call us. This was a class war when the school dropouts held us, who were studying in schools with contempt. It was then also that I sensed that the fact that we cared so much for our elders and the sick also made them resent us because they had to let go so much because they could not afford these.  The sound blared so much that we could all well be dead; it was a salvo, an air raid, a ground attack on our lives, every waking moment of it and even deep into slumber. The boys would suddenly turn on heavy beat music past midnight only for a few minutes, enough to disturb your sleep but not long enough to get used to the sound and doze off.

Things have improved a lot, and the noisescape shows this to us. Walking through a short cut encircling the slum, I find it largely silent, one hardly gets to hear screams and cries, or of quarrels, or of shrieks from children at play. The roads inside the slum are empty for the children are away in school and the adults, mostly women have gone for work. Even the idle men lolling around is thinner in their throng, except some elderly now not only cared for by their families but also have found some employment in manning the tea stall or the biri kiosk in street corners. Sometimes, they even are found guarding the scrap dumps. The improvement in the material conditions of the slum, which has in most cases made them more tolerable neighbours for us has also created political agency, where ballot power is exercised as power to the proletariat to affect changes in the system. The mikes blare once again, this time to assert the allegiance towards one party over the other. Hence the atrocious songs in Hindi, loud croaking voices of devotional music, accompanied by equally loud light decorations. My brother tells me that the electrician had actually tried to climb our walls to put up the toony bulb streamer, once again symptomatic of molesting property as the deafening mics are.