Solitude in sounds
Saturday, 24 April 2010
Maswood Alam Khan
There is no possibility in the offing for the residents of Dhaka city to escape the menace of noise pollution that has already taken its toll on the life of more than 15 million residents in this uncontrollable metropolitan city deemed the most polluted in the whole world.
Residents of Dhaka who are already panting for breath with many burning problems as to unprecedented scarcity of gas, water and electricity and sweating buckets while waiting inside cramped road vehicles for hours in record breaking traffic gridlocks are unaware of other deadly hazards like noise pollution that are invisibly eating away at the core of their health, curtailing drastically our longevity.
According to a news report published on April 20 in a national English daily, the government formulated in 2006 the Noise Pollution Control Rules under the Environment Conservation Act of 1995, but in reality in the last three years there was practically no enforcement of the rule to control unbridled use of noise-producing gadgets like hydraulic horns, the main culprits. According to the same report, a deputy director of the Department of Environment told daily that at present sound pollution was not in the top priority list of their department as they were busy with other issues like polythene and river pollution.
I have come to learn from the report of that daily that on an average the noise level at some busy city areas near Sayedabad Bus Terminal, Bangla Motor, Sonargaon Hotel, Farmgate, Mohakhali Crossing, Maghbazar, Mowchak, Gabtali and Jatrabari is dangerously above 100 db (db=decibel, a unit to measure noise intensity) and the noise level in some sensitive areas near Shaheen School, Motijheel Govt. High School, Dhanmondi Govt. Boys' High School, Azimpur Girls' College, Tejgaon Women's College, P.G. Hospital, Dhaka Medical College Hospital, Mitford Hospital and Children's Hospital is more than 70 db in the mornings and more than 80 db in the afternoons.
According to medical experts, at a noise level measuring 45 dB the average person generally cannot sleep and the ear registers pain at 120 dB. Hearing damage begins at about 85 dB. "If a child below three years of age hears a hydraulic horn emitting 100 dB of noise from a close range, he or she might lose his or her hearing power," reportedly said Dr AF Mohiuddin Khan, Head of the ENT department of the Dhaka Medical College Hospital. The Department of Environment in a report states that noise causes mental and physical illness. It causes high blood pressure, headache, indigestion, tachycardia, peptic ulcers, and also affects sleep. Anyone may become deaf temporarily or permanently, if 100 dB or more noise pollution occurs for half an hour or more in any place.
The report under mention however did not make a mention of the frequent use of loud speakers at night. Residents in Banani residential area near Road Number 01 and 05 have been suffering from hearing fatigues due to loud sounds caused by hundreds and thousands of vendors and hawkers who throng the roads near a Pir's house. Almost every night, a three-hour lectures by the 'muridans' of the Pir Shahib, punctuated by 'milad mahfils' which start at midnight, are blared out by a number of loud speakers, creating intolerable sounds measuring not less than 90 db, thus depriving the neighbors of their sleeps. I myself, being a next-door neighbour of the Pir Shahib, have been through this ordeal for the last few years. At midnight when I no more can withstand the loud sounds of the congregations I have but to close all my windows and doors and tolerate under duress a punishingly cloistered living and more of the season's sultry weather worsened by frequent power outages.
As a consequence of earsplitting sounds of chorus pronounced by the disciples of the Pir Shahib through loud speakers I have developed a pastime is tuning in to FM radio for listening to music, news and commentaries with a view to drowning out the harsh sounds outside of my apartment. Even at times when I read or write I keep my radio on, of course at a moderate volume. The continuous radio transmission does not distract my attention while my mind is focused on something serious. Rather as a kind of 'white noise' the live radio sound helps me mask the unwanted sounds of the environment that would otherwise have distracted my intellectual concentration.
In fact, I got enamored first with FM radio when I was in Malaysia working there for a couple of years in the 1990s. "Light and Easy FM", the most popular nonstop FM radio programme which later was renamed LiteFm, was my most favourite radio station. I wrote in a piece titled, "Radio poised for a comeback," that was published in a number of English newspapers in June 2008: 'My lonely days in Kuala Lumpur all on a sudden became less burdensome as I got used to listening to light, soft and easy English music broadcast from the local 105.7 meter FM band'.
My apartment at Kuala Lumpur which took on a forlorn look after my family had moved to North America suddenly started throbbing with life. Wafting from my Sony Stereo System, nostalgia music featuring easy, catchy, soft and laid-back songs kept my mood always buoyant. I felt deeply connected with the FM Radio Station for the humours, jokes and quips Radio Jockeys used to crack in short interludes between songs to make the listeners feel home and relaxed.
Old songs of the fifties and the sixties like "I heard it through the Grapevine" of Marvin Gaye, "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag" of James Brown, "Tears of A Clown" of Smokey Robinson etc., would cool the air I breathed, untangle the clutters my mind was blocked with, soothe the strains my nerves were fraught with and induce me to hum and dance to their easy, soft and meandering tunes. At times my eyes would get frosted with tears out of melancholy while listening to some very nostalgic melodies like "Streets of London" by Ralph McTell, a tuneful song that sings about the pains and pleasures of loneliness.
It would be a blatant lie if you or I say that we are not lonely. It would also be untrue if one says loneliness is always painful. In fact, unless one is bodily and mentally attached with someone like conjoined or Siamese twins whose skins and internal organs are fused together, a man or a woman is always lonely from the moment he or she was born or at best since the day when he or she left his or her mother's lap and started toddling independently. Lonely everybody has arrived on this planet and lonely we all have to depart from this Earth. We are all lonely in our actions in a society as we are in our meditations in solitude. Solitude has some pains, no doubt; but those pains are agreeable too for only those who know how well to derive pleasures out of solitary seclusions. "Our attitude to solitude is extremely paradoxical. We need it; we suffer from it; and we flee from it. Potentially though positive, solitude is often painful," said Joanne Wielan Burston in his book, "Contemporary Solitude: The Joy and Pain of Being Alone".
While rolling on my ruffled up bed or idling away in my solitary confinement with my doors and windows tightly closed to mask the sounds emanating from the Pir Shahib's house, musical sounds and the RJs' chattering voices from Radio Foorti, Radio Amaar, Radio Today or news from BBC FM give me an invisible companionship, a sweet stream of sounds from the ether breaking the silence of my solitude. I don't feel lonely. My apartment does not look so sad and dejected with radio sounds always charging the air and filling the void. I feel someone inside the plastic chamber of my pocket transistor were always there as my buddy. The resultant ambience is neither noise nor silence, but a relaxing murmur. The effect is similar to lying on a crowded sea beach, where faraway voices mingle with the sounds of the surf to lull you into a state of relaxation. This state allows you to calm the body and focus the mind. My solitude is thus filled with crowds of sounds -- filtering out the pink sounds by the white sounds day and night.
The writer may be reached at
e-mail : maswood@hotmail.com
There is no possibility in the offing for the residents of Dhaka city to escape the menace of noise pollution that has already taken its toll on the life of more than 15 million residents in this uncontrollable metropolitan city deemed the most polluted in the whole world.
Residents of Dhaka who are already panting for breath with many burning problems as to unprecedented scarcity of gas, water and electricity and sweating buckets while waiting inside cramped road vehicles for hours in record breaking traffic gridlocks are unaware of other deadly hazards like noise pollution that are invisibly eating away at the core of their health, curtailing drastically our longevity.
According to a news report published on April 20 in a national English daily, the government formulated in 2006 the Noise Pollution Control Rules under the Environment Conservation Act of 1995, but in reality in the last three years there was practically no enforcement of the rule to control unbridled use of noise-producing gadgets like hydraulic horns, the main culprits. According to the same report, a deputy director of the Department of Environment told daily that at present sound pollution was not in the top priority list of their department as they were busy with other issues like polythene and river pollution.
I have come to learn from the report of that daily that on an average the noise level at some busy city areas near Sayedabad Bus Terminal, Bangla Motor, Sonargaon Hotel, Farmgate, Mohakhali Crossing, Maghbazar, Mowchak, Gabtali and Jatrabari is dangerously above 100 db (db=decibel, a unit to measure noise intensity) and the noise level in some sensitive areas near Shaheen School, Motijheel Govt. High School, Dhanmondi Govt. Boys' High School, Azimpur Girls' College, Tejgaon Women's College, P.G. Hospital, Dhaka Medical College Hospital, Mitford Hospital and Children's Hospital is more than 70 db in the mornings and more than 80 db in the afternoons.
According to medical experts, at a noise level measuring 45 dB the average person generally cannot sleep and the ear registers pain at 120 dB. Hearing damage begins at about 85 dB. "If a child below three years of age hears a hydraulic horn emitting 100 dB of noise from a close range, he or she might lose his or her hearing power," reportedly said Dr AF Mohiuddin Khan, Head of the ENT department of the Dhaka Medical College Hospital. The Department of Environment in a report states that noise causes mental and physical illness. It causes high blood pressure, headache, indigestion, tachycardia, peptic ulcers, and also affects sleep. Anyone may become deaf temporarily or permanently, if 100 dB or more noise pollution occurs for half an hour or more in any place.
The report under mention however did not make a mention of the frequent use of loud speakers at night. Residents in Banani residential area near Road Number 01 and 05 have been suffering from hearing fatigues due to loud sounds caused by hundreds and thousands of vendors and hawkers who throng the roads near a Pir's house. Almost every night, a three-hour lectures by the 'muridans' of the Pir Shahib, punctuated by 'milad mahfils' which start at midnight, are blared out by a number of loud speakers, creating intolerable sounds measuring not less than 90 db, thus depriving the neighbors of their sleeps. I myself, being a next-door neighbour of the Pir Shahib, have been through this ordeal for the last few years. At midnight when I no more can withstand the loud sounds of the congregations I have but to close all my windows and doors and tolerate under duress a punishingly cloistered living and more of the season's sultry weather worsened by frequent power outages.
As a consequence of earsplitting sounds of chorus pronounced by the disciples of the Pir Shahib through loud speakers I have developed a pastime is tuning in to FM radio for listening to music, news and commentaries with a view to drowning out the harsh sounds outside of my apartment. Even at times when I read or write I keep my radio on, of course at a moderate volume. The continuous radio transmission does not distract my attention while my mind is focused on something serious. Rather as a kind of 'white noise' the live radio sound helps me mask the unwanted sounds of the environment that would otherwise have distracted my intellectual concentration.
In fact, I got enamored first with FM radio when I was in Malaysia working there for a couple of years in the 1990s. "Light and Easy FM", the most popular nonstop FM radio programme which later was renamed LiteFm, was my most favourite radio station. I wrote in a piece titled, "Radio poised for a comeback," that was published in a number of English newspapers in June 2008: 'My lonely days in Kuala Lumpur all on a sudden became less burdensome as I got used to listening to light, soft and easy English music broadcast from the local 105.7 meter FM band'.
My apartment at Kuala Lumpur which took on a forlorn look after my family had moved to North America suddenly started throbbing with life. Wafting from my Sony Stereo System, nostalgia music featuring easy, catchy, soft and laid-back songs kept my mood always buoyant. I felt deeply connected with the FM Radio Station for the humours, jokes and quips Radio Jockeys used to crack in short interludes between songs to make the listeners feel home and relaxed.
Old songs of the fifties and the sixties like "I heard it through the Grapevine" of Marvin Gaye, "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag" of James Brown, "Tears of A Clown" of Smokey Robinson etc., would cool the air I breathed, untangle the clutters my mind was blocked with, soothe the strains my nerves were fraught with and induce me to hum and dance to their easy, soft and meandering tunes. At times my eyes would get frosted with tears out of melancholy while listening to some very nostalgic melodies like "Streets of London" by Ralph McTell, a tuneful song that sings about the pains and pleasures of loneliness.
It would be a blatant lie if you or I say that we are not lonely. It would also be untrue if one says loneliness is always painful. In fact, unless one is bodily and mentally attached with someone like conjoined or Siamese twins whose skins and internal organs are fused together, a man or a woman is always lonely from the moment he or she was born or at best since the day when he or she left his or her mother's lap and started toddling independently. Lonely everybody has arrived on this planet and lonely we all have to depart from this Earth. We are all lonely in our actions in a society as we are in our meditations in solitude. Solitude has some pains, no doubt; but those pains are agreeable too for only those who know how well to derive pleasures out of solitary seclusions. "Our attitude to solitude is extremely paradoxical. We need it; we suffer from it; and we flee from it. Potentially though positive, solitude is often painful," said Joanne Wielan Burston in his book, "Contemporary Solitude: The Joy and Pain of Being Alone".
While rolling on my ruffled up bed or idling away in my solitary confinement with my doors and windows tightly closed to mask the sounds emanating from the Pir Shahib's house, musical sounds and the RJs' chattering voices from Radio Foorti, Radio Amaar, Radio Today or news from BBC FM give me an invisible companionship, a sweet stream of sounds from the ether breaking the silence of my solitude. I don't feel lonely. My apartment does not look so sad and dejected with radio sounds always charging the air and filling the void. I feel someone inside the plastic chamber of my pocket transistor were always there as my buddy. The resultant ambience is neither noise nor silence, but a relaxing murmur. The effect is similar to lying on a crowded sea beach, where faraway voices mingle with the sounds of the surf to lull you into a state of relaxation. This state allows you to calm the body and focus the mind. My solitude is thus filled with crowds of sounds -- filtering out the pink sounds by the white sounds day and night.
The writer may be reached at
e-mail : maswood@hotmail.com