Eyes shut, I navigate the city streets on my bike, walk the roads, and linger at the busy crossroads near Saket Metro, where the cacophony of traffic roars its loudest. The reverberations of horns pierce through my body, violating its inner sanctity. Strangely, this intrusion is deemed neither a privacy breach nor a crime against the delicate harmony of bodily functions.
Amid accusations of exaggeration, I ponder: What if a knife or a needle, not necessarily used for medical reasons to save a life, penetrated my flesh? What if an anonymous passerby enacted such violence? How would society look at the person? How would the law look at that person, and how would that person look at himself? The social gaze, legal judgments, and self-reflection – all intertwine in this scenario. If I compare that knife or that needle with the horn, will there be charges against me for exaggerating my imagination? I provoke this thought to redefine the unbearable noise of traffic horns as a tangible intrusion, penetrating not only the body but also the mind’s recesses. As they enter the body, the sounds vibrate through the various surfaces of the skin, vibrating the cells, the tissues, and the nerves. They vibrate the organs and affect their moves.
Blaring horns, causing bodily harm, escape the realm of criminality. Noise, dismissed as a trifling nuisance, eludes our scrutiny, an assumption shielding its culpability. We dismiss noise’s criminality, assuming it benign to our bodies, minds, health, and society. Yet, this assumption blinds us to the criminality that will always be overlooked, if we try to look. The point is to hear, to listen. We have to listen to the depth and magnitude of loss caused by noise pollution, if required, with eyes closed, reduced distractions, and slowly hearing the subtle movements within our bodies and the world outside; only then can we feel and realize the potency of crime and loss in the realm of noise.
Yet, I am undeniably a fool to draw parallels between weapons and horns. Who dares embrace such an analogy in a world where innocent bodies fall prey to thunderous weapons, weapons that lay bare our complicity in the repository of wrongs and injustices woven across the planet? We’ve forged a pact, a sinister peace, vowing to abstain from resisting the hands that wield these transgressions. The sins and injustices etched into the very fabric of our world remain immune to our condemnation, for we’ve tacitly agreed to a selective resistance. Only when these wrongs and injustices carve themselves against the canvas of our own bodies; our own flesh, do we stir from our indifference? The planet’s demise becomes inconsequential beyond the boundaries of my own body – the vessel destined to witness the world outside crumble into decay.