Can we please stop playing reels in public?

A few weeks ago, Delhi-based author and leadership coach Aparna Jain had an early morning flight from terminal 3 of Indira Gandhi International Airport. Since she’d reached early, she stopped for a bite.

“It was relatively quiet at that hour, except for the music played by the restaurant,” Jain says. “But then a man sitting three tables away started blaring reels on his mobile phone.” After listening to the tinny noises playing on loop for a couple of minutes, she politely requested him to use headphones. He looked up briefly, then returned to scrolling as though no one had spoken at all.

“I repeated myself after a few seconds, in Hindi and a little louder this time,” Jain says, “but a woman sitting nearby started yelling at me.” Inexplicably, this stranger had taken it upon herself to defend the man. “She said I shouldn’t expect everyone to own headphones and since we were in a public space, all of us had the right to do whatever we wanted,” Jain adds. When she countered that being in a public place meant learning to respect others, Jain was ignored. The only silver lining in this episode was that the original offender got nervous and put his device away.

Jain’s experience is far from unique. Rather, it is fast becoming the new normal of public etiquette in most parts around the world, with the rare exception of cultures like Japan where making or taking calls on public transport is frowned upon. In India, noisy behaviour in public spaces tends to polarise responses. To begin with, people here are used to living with higher levels of ambient noise, especially in cities. An article in the Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology, published in 2024-25, says most Indian cities experience noise levels far exceeding the World Health Organization recommendation of 53 decibels for road traffic.

Add to it a myriad of other cacophonies: music played over loudspeakers, bursting of firecrackers at the drop of a hat to celebrate a sporting win or wedding, the hammering and drilling at construction sites, and so on. The result is a cocoon of noise that seems to envelop most Indians from morning to night, like a background score to their lives that is barely registered. No wonder Indians often fail to realise they may be causing discomfort to others by making noise themselves.

“I don’t think people have become less polite. It’s just that earlier they didn’t have access to these technologies,” says Bengaluru-based Padmini Ray Murray, founder of Design Beku, a collective that aims to dismantle expectations created by market-driven notions of design. There was a time when it was normal for people to blast sports commentary on radios in public, which must have irritated some, she says. “It is likely that those who would be engrossed in a match were not even aware of disturbing others.”

The ubiquity of people watching reels or making video calls without headphones owes much to the penetration of smartphones. A 2025 survey conducted by the ministry of statistics and program implementation indicates that 85% of households possess at least one smartphone. If you consider the low data costs and expanding 4G and 5G network, which now covers up to 88% of villages, it is unsurprising that users are consuming video-based content more than ever.

Older generations may be doing this because of diminished hearing abilities. And while Indian cultural mores tend to give a free pass to the elderly, there is scientific evidence to corroborate such public conduct. Mumbai-based psychiatrist Dr. Sheryl John says that with age, the prefrontal cortex of the human brain starts shrinking. “It’s the part that is supposed to tell us how to behave,” she explains. “In younger adolescents, it is not fully developed yet, and can be affected due to constant use of gadgets. This can lead to a lack of self-regulation.” However, most often, it is the passive bystander who ends up suffering the consequences.

On 16 January, Anand Sankar, an entrepreneur, called out an “uncle” for watching reels at full volume all through a flight on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter). “Usually I would tell someone like this to shut it down. But yesterday I decided to observe,” he wrote from his handle @saybwala. “None of the passengers in two rows around cared (sic). The cabin crew who walked past multiple times and even did meal service didn’t bother telling him.”

In a longish post, Sankar wondered if he should simply accept that “uncouth behaviour is normal in public”. His sentiment resonated widely with others, especially frequent fliers, who began sharing their own stories. At the time of writing this piece in the middle of March, his post has had 9.3 million views and counting.

Ray Murray says she, too, has encountered unfiltered digital noise on flights. “Usually I ask people to use headphones and more often than not, while they might be disgruntled, they comply” she says. “Only once I had to get a cabin crew to intervene.” But not everyone is as lucky.

On 15 January, another X user, Ritu Joon, complained about a terrible in-flight experience—it was her post Sankar had quoted when he shared his own plight. On her flight, Joon wrote, a 10-12 year-old child had been shouting, trying to get his parents’ attention. The latter “seemed to find” the behaviour “cute.” “I was reading a book, so I politely asked him to keep quiet,” she added. “His mother replied, ‘This is not a library.’ After that, they started playing antakshari.” Joon ended her post, which has 6.5 million views so far, by adding that “Some people clearly lack civic sense and unfortunately pass the same behaviour on to their children.”

In a society where children are growing up immersed in a sea of digital content, and parents are defaulting to gadgets to entertain them while also being loath to correct bad behaviour, it doesn’t seem surprising that the overall threshold for noise sensitivity is quite high.

“A large part of noisy behaviour comes out of a failure of emotional intelligence, which is the ability to cultivate awareness of ourselves as well as people around us,” says Dr. John. Short-form content, like reels, activates the reward pathway of the brain, providing a dopamine rush, which leads to repetitive behaviour, she explains. Prolonged indulgence in such conduct eventually produces an addictive pattern.

“There is research to show a correlation between mental health and noise pollution,” Dr. John adds. “The human brain is primed to pay attention to loud sounds, which impairs our ability to concentrate on any specific task.” The more we scroll through reels, our sympathetic nervous system gets activated, which leads to increased production of cortisol.

“As the fight-or-flight response keeps getting stimulated, we are ready to snap easily,” she adds. “In India, there never was a clear boundary between public and private space. Earlier our private space at least used to be our thoughts, but now it has become our gadgets.”

It’s one thing for a neurotypical person to react adversely to noisy reels. For those who are neurodivergent, the impact of such overstimulation can be far more triggering. “If you have ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), you already have multiple tabs open inside your head,” says Mugdha Kalra, a PhD scholar and neurodiversity advocate. “Now imagine adding more and more tabs, as you are forced to listen to the grating noise of reels around you.” As a mother to a 16-year-old boy with autism, she is primed to note such disruptions. “Many people want to wind down in their local parks, during flights, or even in public transport. But there is no respite from noisy smartphones now,” Kalra says. “For a neurodivergent person triggered by noise, this can mean a lack of safe space to unwind.”

Kalra trained her son to wear headphones from a young age, even at home, so that he would get familiar with the idea of using it in public. “Many children who are undiagnosed or masking tend to go home and shut themselves in their rooms, hide under a blanket, or cut themselves off from others—these behaviours may be their response to the noise in which their daily lives are drowning.”

In a world where polite requests to turn down the volume may escalate into heated fights, are there possible solutions to mitigate digital noise pollution? Ray Murray mentions the quiet coaches in British railways that allow commuters to enjoy a peaceful journey. “In controlled environments it is possible to legitimately object to others making noise,” she says. “But does that mean one must pay more to buy silence? What would such a practice do to the idea of public space, which belongs to everybody and nobody?”

Requests to passengers to use headphones have been added to the roster of announcements that keep rolling on the Delhi Metro. But poor civic sense continues to shock people in the most unexpected circumstances. A friend, whose parent was recently admitted into a hospital, had to ask a patient in the next bed to stop playing videos loudly on their phone. In a recent viral video on social media, a woman had a meltdown on an American Airlines flight from Miami to Tampa after she was removed from the aircraft for repeatedly playing videos on her phone without headphones. In an even darker incident, recently a 17-year-old speech-impaired teenager was allegedly beaten to death by another youth after a misunderstanding while watching a cricket match on a cellphone in Bihar’s Vaishali district.

In the long run, the more we allow digital noise pollution to continue unchecked, the less we will be able to show empathy. “Our dopamine circuit is being fried completely, which is making us behave ever more aggressively, pushing us to seek a high all the time, and act impulsively,” says Dr. John. “We no longer know how to be quiet, or even bored.”