City City, Bang Bang And Boom Boom

Diwali's here and the competition is up. The race is on to see who's the best city in terms of most decibels produced with (deep) respect to crackers exploding, drunkeness (minds imploding) and general nuisance. To prepare for this situation, i had readied my mind to acquire that state of perpetual numbness to irritating, asynchronous sounds. To be frank, i really had not much of a choice in the matter (refering to the Noise Lessons here). My gentle, regular readers have already read my post on the many advantages of living literally under construction so i will not bore you with the same details but will only link it here. And here again in order to give you double the chance in case you decide to close your eyes and click randomly on the screen and let fate decide on whether you should read the dusty, web-covered post. But i digress, for the nth time, so lets get back to more digressing later on. Ahem! Yes, yes... regarding my sound therapy, here's the list:

- Dogs barking in the neighborhood at random. And damned Pomenarians barking 3 and a 1/2 times the normal output of the yellowish-brown color fits all standard sized street dog.
- People yelling (AAAY!) to talk to someone regardless of whether both of them are standing a quarter of a kilometer apart or are ear to ear.
- Homo sapiens yelling louder when they are using their cellphones.
- Guys trying to be macho and reving up their bikes for five minutes. Wroom wroom. Extra points to global warming here.
- Traffic and the ready "Horn Ok Please" attitude.
- Near my home, a regular BOOM goes off in the background every fifteen minutes or so. Don't know what made me decide it was a canon sounding the time. Furthur research, which was simply passing the area courtesy of public transport, yielded the fact that the place was some kind of stone mine with loads of dynamite necessary to make smaller morsels for the lorries to transport.
- And the list would be incomplete without the in-your-ear music, broadcasted non-stop whether its your neighbor's tv, his/her recently acquired car or ancient sound system, marriage function, funeral or simply, for the heck of it, radio volume on max.

Advantages of the treatment:

- Could stand the noise generated on double diwali (both south-indian and north-indian).
- When someone on the road lights a cracker, didn't even need to mentally brace for the explosion.
- All related music and lights suddenely acquired background (and hence unimportant, taken for granted) status.
- Of course, my trusty headphones did share in the burden too (both therapy and reality wise). Its all about teamwork, you know :)

So here's wishing you a Happy Diwali, my friend!

PS: Inspite of all the irritations, the huge sky fireworks were awesome!!!