Some Tuesdays in summers are considered very very auspicious and special in our town, Lucknow. People call them “Bara Mangal”. Incidentally today also when I am keying in this article, it happens to be one of such Tuesday. On previous Tuesday, when our family was strolling around in the nearby market area, we decided to enter a temple to pay respect to the Tuesday idol “Lord Hanuman”. Suddenly the priest and his allies started sounding the temple bells with full force. It was the time of the evening prayer. It was a small temple and the temple bells were rather large. The thumping sound of the bells made me feel uncomfortable and we came out of the temple room. I did remember the famous couplet from Saint Kabir, who objected to sounds from religious places, arguing if the God has become deaf or what? I narrated the same couplet to my son and he also remembered that he read it in his school days.
That day itself, I decided to share this episode with my readers. Later, I searched the net for knowing the related facts. With the kind of experience I had, I can tell you that the sound we were forced to listen inside the small temple room must have been in the order of 130 to 140 decibels. It was deafening and made all of us feel giddy. More than 90 db we start feeling discomfort and with every 10 db increase the intensity of sound actually doubles. Sometimes I feel that the custom of making high volume sounds along with religious prayers might have been by design a method to hallucinate the people standing there, so that they give more donations and offerings. The minds become so blank after hearing such sounds, that whatever the priests says appears to be true. When I dig deeper into the ancient history, the custom of making sounds might actually be a way to keep jungle animals away from the place of dwellings. Along with evening food that people cooked on fire, they used to sing and dance around the fire, which was a form of God for them. Then they created clay or stone idols and placed it nearby and started worshipping them. A system that was created due to a need actually carried through centuries and today also we are making unreasonably high decibels of noise on daily basis in the name of worship. We have laws, but implementation is definitely challenging. Even few steps like making smaller bell size, controlling PA system volumes and following strict time guidelines can help a lot. God is already listening to us; we don’t have to awake him by our more than 100 db efforts.
Dr. Sunil Ji Garg
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