It was a casual conversation at home that stayed with me.
My mother once suggested organising a Jagaran. It was said lightly, without insistence—as these things often are in families. I agreed in principle. The songs, the devotion, the staying awake through the night—none of that troubled me.
Only one detail did.
I mentioned, almost as an aside, that loudspeakers could only be used till 10 p.m., as per the rules. After that, the music would have to continue without amplification.
She paused.
“What’s the point of a Jagaran without loudspeakers?” she asked.
I remember replying with a question of my own: what does devotion have to do with volume?
The conversation ended there. It was never brought up again. But the question lingered.
I have no discomfort with prayer, rituals, or collective worship. What unsettles me is the assumption—now almost unquestioned—that faith must announce itself loudly to be considered sincere.
Somewhere along the way, loudspeakers seem to have become inseparable from religious expression. As if belief, to be valid, must spill beyond the home, the temple, the gathering—and enter the lives of those who did not ask for it.
But devotion, at least as I understand it, is intimate. It is a conversation, not a broadcast. Its strength lies in absorption, not amplification.
We guard our personal relationships carefully. We do not place them on display for strangers, nor narrate their details for public approval. Faith, too, belongs to that inward space. When it is forced outward through noise, something essential is lost.
Living in a dense, shared city teaches you the value of restraint.
There are people preparing for work the next morning, children trying to sleep, the unwell, the elderly. These lives exist alongside places of worship, not beneath them. Civic life depends on a fragile balance—one person’s freedom tempered by another’s need for rest.
Rules about sound are not attacks on belief. They are acknowledgements of coexistence.
Yet, objections to excessive noise are often read as hostility—sometimes even as disrespect toward faith. This is a misunderstanding that hurts everyone involved. Asking for quiet is not an act of irreverence. It is an appeal for consideration.
Travel makes this contrast clearer.
In some societies, quiet hours are treated with seriousness—not because people are less expressive, but because shared space is respected. Noise is not morally neutral; it is understood as something that travels, affects, intrudes.
That awareness does not weaken community. It strengthens it.
The question, then, is not whether devotion should exist in public life. It always has.
The question is simpler, and perhaps harder: must devotion be loud to be meaningful?
If a neighbour asks for the volume to be lowered after a long day, is faith truly diminished by that request? Or is it an opportunity to practise the very compassion that religion speaks of?
I don’t believe belief needs defending with decibels.
Quiet, too, can be an offering.
Somewhere nearby, someone is setting an alarm for the morning, or turning over after a long day. Their life is ordinary, unremarkable—and deserving of rest. Remembering that, quiet begins to feel less like a restriction and more like a form of care.