India’s ‘Loudcasters’: How Public Speakerphone Culture Is Becoming A Civic Nuisance
· Free Press Journal
I now know what is cooking in someone else’s kitchen tonight. I know which cousin has offended which aunt in a family inheritance quarrel. I know which colleague has betrayed which office friend. And, occasionally, I also know things about people’s marital desires that no stranger should ever be compelled to hear.
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This knowledge comes while sitting in hospital waiting areas, temple courtyards, airport lounges, and inside packed public transport coaches. It arrives through the most democratic invention of our time—the mobile phone—on full volume and proudly on loudspeaker mode.
Are you a loudcaster?
We have long known the loudmouth. Now we have the loudcaster. The ‘loudcaster’ is that irritating citizen who treats the mobile phone not as a communication device but as a portable public address system. The phone speaker explodes with the energy of a political rally. What should have been a quiet exchange between two people or a video or music that someone is to watch in private becomes a broadcast generously shared with every unwilling listener within earshot.
It is a peculiar form of exhibitionism. The loudcaster believes they are minding their own business. The uncomfortable truth is that they have made their business everyone else’s problem.
Public spaces turned into private broadcasts
The experience is most vivid inside the dense machinery of mass public spaces that millions rely on every single day. The early morning local train ride already contains enough drama without needing additional soundtracks. Yet, somewhere between two stations, a phone suddenly erupts with a conversation about a family property dispute. In a hospital waiting area, someone is watching a video clip at full volume. At a coffee shop, someone is conducting an office discussion loudly on speaker mode. A crowded metro coach can carry devotional songs, movie dialogues, and office gossip all at the same time.
The share taxi ride, where strangers sit inches apart in practical coexistence, has also joined this acoustic carnival. One passenger calls home on speaker mode to announce the arrival time. Another begins narrating workplace grievances to a friend. By the time the destination is reached, the entire vehicle knows the private details of multiple lives that nobody had asked to learn.
Entitlement and lack of civic restraint
What makes the loudcaster fascinating is the confidence with which the performance unfolds. On the contrary, there is often a subtle sense of entitlement. The logic appears simple: my call deserves to be heard; my video deserves to be played; my music deserves an audience. If the surrounding people do not appreciate the experience, they are free to move away.
This small everyday behaviour reveals a deeper civic truth. Public space functions only when citizens recognise that they are not alone in it. Every functioning society depends on an invisible agreement in which individuals exercise a small degree of restraint so that everyone else can share the same environment comfortably. The loudcaster loudly breaks that agreement.
Silence versus confrontation
Even more revealing is what happens when someone politely asks the loudcaster to lower the volume. The request is often treated as an insult. The person seeking silence suddenly becomes the offender. Voices rise. Occasionally there is abuse. Sometimes confrontation follows. Most witnesses quickly retreat into their own discomfort. Civic courage rarely survives the possibility of a public argument.
Which raises a sobering question. Inside a crowded train compartment or a packed metro coach, how many of us would actually support the person who dares to ask the loudspeaker bully to lower the volume?
A society conditioned to noise
Our relationship with sound has always been complicated. For decades, we have tolerated loudspeakers outside our homes in the name of religion, politics, and celebration. Entire neighbourhoods have grown accustomed to amplified devotion, amplified campaigning, and amplified festivities. When a society learns to accept noise as normal in its civic life, it slowly becomes comfortable reproducing the same noise in its personal behaviour.
The mobile phone has merely democratised the loudspeaker. Every citizen now carries one in their pocket.
Habit, memory, and migration
Part of the explanation may lie in memory. Many Indians who grew up before the 1990s remember a time when telephones were rare luxuries. Entire neighbourhoods depended on the one house that possessed a landline. Connections crackled. Voices had to travel through unreliable signals. People shouted into receivers, hoping the sound would reach another city. That habit of speaking loudly into a device may still linger somewhere in our collective behaviour, even though modern microphones are perfectly capable of hearing whispers.
Another explanation lies in migration and habit. In smaller towns and villages, it was perfectly normal to call out across a street or courtyard. Sound travelled across open spaces, and very few people were disturbed. When these habits arrive inside dense urban environments, the consequences change.
Civilisation and restraint
Urban life demands a discipline of behaviour. Discipline is not always our strongest civic instinct. Noise pollution is often discussed in the language of decibels and regulations. Environmental campaigns frequently remind us that excessive sound affects health, sleep, and stress levels. Yet the deeper problem is cultural rather than technical.
Civilisation is not measured only by technological progress; it is also measured by restraint. Our society has enthusiastically embraced the first. The second still struggles for attention.
A test of civic character
Which brings us to a simple test of civic character. The next time a loudcaster turns a shared public space into their personal broadcast station, will you find the courtesy and courage to ask them to take their conversation somewhere private and, more importantly, pause to consider whether you might sometimes be that loudcaster yourself?
Civilisation begins with the simple ability to feel embarrassed at the right moment. One wonders whether we, inhabitants of this republic of loudcasters, still possess that ability.
Dr Srinath Sridharan is a policy researcher and corporate adviser. X: @ssmumbai