Even seven years ago when I moved to Santiniketan, the peace and quiet of the area in which I am lucky enough to live would be disturbed only very occasionally. The sound of a passing train (the train tracks are close to our boundary), a few bus horns from those plying on the other side of the train tracks and the occasional purr of a passing car were all I heard, except, of course, the birds.
Now not only has the number of cars that ply (SUVs of tourists from Kolkata) on our quiet residential road increased, but there seems to have been an explosion in the number of motorbikes that whizz past. But the most annoying are probably the bicycle riders. Every passing cycle means a snatch of a Hindi movie number. For all cycle riders, mobile phones are the equivalents of car radios. In fact, many young boys from less privileged houses do not bother to have any “balance” for outgoing or even incoming “missed” calls but use the phones purely to download music to which they listen as they swagger or cycle down the roads.
What personally annoys me is the tendency of Indians of all ages and wealth categories to think that they are doing others a favour by making them listen to their favourite hit numbers, on the road, in buses, in trains. But what I heard recently from a young couple who just got married takes the cake. It was funny but alarming.
The young couple, studying at the Visva Bharati University till recently, finished their postgraduation and got married. But their jobs keep them now in two different cities. The girl works in Kolkata and the boy in a small town in Birbhum district. A few days ago there was a puja at the boy’s village home and his wife was required to be there suitably dressed. As she arrived there in her red sari, she could hear the kirtan at her in-laws’ place over a loudspeaker for the benefit of the whole village. Being city-bred, she found this noise intrusion a trifle surprising, even if it was in the name of god. What was truly amazing was that this loudspeaker was on the whole day.
Finally the kirtan came to an end at eight in the evening and she thought peace would prevail. Although she did not voice her opinion, she was secretly embarrassed at her in-laws’ complete disregard for noise pollution.
But then, just as suddenly as it had stopped, it started again. And this time there was no kirtan. One of her sisters-in-law held her mobile phone near the loudspeaker and played “O tunir ma”, a Bengali hit with the raunchiness of a “Munni badnam hui”.
While her sister-in-law was very keen that her daughter should dance to the music, slowly all the women of the household were out in the courtyard dancing to raunchy numbers including “Sheila ki jawani”. The young wife from the city was amazed at her ability to gyrate to the songs in her red sari, her ghungat firmly pinned with clips on either side of her head.
Although the revelry continued well into the night, no villager complained. It could be because the perpetrators were part of a revered family of the village and, therefore, could not be questioned or probably because the villagers, too, were dancing to the beat in their own homes.
But just as the embarrassed newly-wed thought things were beginning to cool off because all the popular numbers had been danced to, she was in for another surprise. The loudspeaker blared to life with the World Cup Shakira number “Waka waka”. For those still wondering about the impact of globalisation in India, this one surely removes all doubts.
