To begin, a quiet word. This blog comes from a noisy country. Indians are noisy people and not ashamed of it. Our traffic is never only about transport, it is the daily rendition of the wildly popular Cuss Concerto for Horn. We would speak loudly on mobile phones in libraries if only they would let us. 

Yet for the first few hours, the vuvuzela left even us in stunned silence. It wasn't so much the sound of those deranged drones as their eternal presence every second of every World Cup football match. Plain impressive. Fifty thousand or more breaths into those plastic trumpets non-stop for almost two hours. Two hours. No stopping for food, drink or even conversation. Those lungs could take on anything, anything. Metallica concerts, jet planes, Samba drums. 

And you know what? Now India is used to it. Every evening when we switch on our TVs, even before the picture comes on, we hear the vuvus. It's familiar; it's the sound of World Cup month, its real reminder even more than Waka Waka. 

Sure, not the purest of sounds, but it's like an atmospheric cloak. It's what will be the soundtrack of the future when we see Tshabalala's left-footed rocket fired into the right-hand corner. Or Lionel Messi skip, then swerve as if he were immune to the vuvu and lifted above the heaving breath and menacing tread of surrounding defenders. 

In India's eastern corner, where the local language has no sound for ‘V', it has even come close to sweetness being called the ‘Bhubhujela' in Bengali.   

Not everyone loves it, but we just get it. At the scene of the action, some sports crowds like to see and they like to be heard when seeing. 

India's cricket matches offer an entire range. It starts with a loud greeting when the team is sighted (even for warm-ups), moves onto a lusty cheer when the game begins, revving up the home team's bowlers running in when wickets are imminent. Quiet passages of play are interspersed by whistling, hooting, even booing and the most dazzlingly quick Mexican waves. For the last two decades, there's been Sachin-chanting. Listen here to his home ground, the Wankhede Stadium, as he walks out to bat versus England in 2007. 

When the Indian team's former Australian physio John Gloster went onto the field just before a 2005 one-day international in Kochi it was he said, "my first real exposure to the total power of the Indian cricket crowd ... You can feel the sound in your stomach it reverberates like a heavy bass. I thought if this is Indian cricket, this is what I want to be a part of." It was and it still is.

At a Lord's Test for the first time in 1997, I first soaked in the terracotta clubhouse and emerald turf and next wondered why the crowd was so hushed. Weren't they into the game at all? 

It seems as if the vuvu's under attack from the MCC on some days and the World Health Organisation on others.

A Wall Street Journal blog offers interesting statistics. NASCAR races hit 140 decibels and Seattle's Quest Field stadium is said to have the loudest crowd at an American football game, Fox Sports reporting decibel levels of 137. (Vuvu's top score: 127). A single F1 car does about 125 decibels, this year's championship grid has 24 cars. During Superleague Formula races, Indian driver Narain Karthikeyan's manager wears ear-plugs under his headset. 

We understand why the vuvus peeve some. Like sound engineers recalibrating equalizers all over again or commentators' with egos injured by pitching dulcet tones against plastic pipes. 

Some of the complaints, though, remain mystifying. One wire service writer bashed a mean pulpit saying, "Hosting planet football brings responsibilities". Which means what? Taking away the hosts' joy of watching the Cup the way they want to? "Sounds should ebb and flow like tides," went on football's Homer (Simpson). "Fans reacting with their voices to action on the pitch, to events in the stadium and to each other's sounds, songs and chants are part of football's theater. Outside of South Africa, they are." Inside of South Africa, they do their theatre differently. Besides, the legendary theatre being talked about has often included monkey sounds against black players, racial, anti-Semitic, and Islamophobic chanting. 

So, let's not go all Ministry of Sound here. 

The vuvuzela fussbudgets can either turn down the volume on their remotes or wear ear-plugs. 

Oh, and to end, a request. Please keep those voices down.