Festivals and other religious and community occasions are increasingly imposed on all those within earshot. And more people are forced into participating in this through the loudspeaker.

There are five mosques around my house. It is only the rare neighbourhood in urban India where one cannot hear the azan. I cannot remember ever having lived out of earshot of some or the other mosque, including during my time working in Ahmedabad, which is an otherwise segregated city.

I've only seen a couple of the mosques around my home, but I know there are five because of the loudspeakers they use to call for prayer. First three go off more or less together, then a fourth and, 15 or so minutes later, the fifth.

I have never understood why so many announcements were needed since all of them are equally audible. Perhaps it has to do with sects though I cannot tell how the calls are different one from another.

Just after the fajr namaz call around 5.15 am or so every morning, military music strikes up. We share a wall with the 106th infantry batallion and so this music often interrupts my hangovers. Apparently the thing that soldiers seem to like to march to (or are forced to march to) is Saare jahan se achcha.

This is the nationalist poem, original title 'Tarana-e-Hindi,' that Allama Iqbal wrote before his more militant phase. The drums are muffled, not amplified, and the tune is played through brass, not incompetently.

On Fridays, and I am writing this on Friday, one of the mosques usually has someone shouting something angrily, or passionately, over the loudspeaker for an hour or so, and I wonder what the soldiers make of that.

During the Eids, a festival, and during Ramzan, the mosques all have special services and these are also broadcast loudly. They have no music of course and it all ends most of the time before dusk, again with the exception of the Isha namaz calls, which sound out after 7 pm.

Hindu festivals are celebrated not with talk or lecture but music. This is sometimes of the devotional sort, though it is not easy for me to tell because there are many languages involved in my neighbourhood. But most of it is film music with heavy rhythm arrangements that south Indians prefer and north Indians find irritating. And all of it is loud. This music continues into the night and often it is 11 pm before there is quiet - till dawn, that is, when everything begins again - mosque, military and then music.

This is Christmas season, and I was taken aback to hear loud Tamilian music on 25 December, though I shouldn't have been, given the pattern of conversions in India.

In Bombay, where I lived most of my life, the midnight mass was something that I anticipated. It came from the church, St Andrew's, which was next door and because Christian choirs are trained, the quality of the music was high. And it was live and not a recording from a film. When a court banned all loudspeakers after 10 pm a few years ago, the mass was forcibly brought forward a couple of hours.

I thought this was an injustice because it denied Christians the release of the moment. It was only once a year, and that should have been considered by courts going after something else. Also the fact that their mass was much less intrusive than the cacophony that religion otherwise brings in India. There was also of course the fact that I prefer the western canon of religious music.

Anyway, I understand the government managed to get a few days of exemption for some religious things, and now it seems as if more or less everything is back to abnormal.

India is becoming noisier by the decade as technology becomes affordable and accessible.

Festivals and other religious and community occasions are increasingly imposed on all those within earshot. And more people are forced into participating in this through the loudspeaker. I don't think this a pleasant experience and it is going to get worse.