Skip to main content

Festivals and I

Diwali in 2008 at the staff quarters of Sawan Public School, Delhi


I don’t celebrate festivals now. I never celebrated them after I lost my childhood. Onam and Christmas were my favourite childhood festivals. Both were colourful and joyful. Onam called my attention to the variety of flora available in my village. Children used to come to pluck flowers from our land in order to make the floral carpet for Maveli. It is then I became aware of the very existence of some of those flowers.
The cutest attraction of Christmas was the crib we made at home. Father led the exercise. The children’s duty was to collect the raw materials from the farm. We collected palm leaves and a particular variety of grass that grew abundantly in December. This grass was called Infant Jesus grass (ഉണ്à´£ീà´¶ോ à´ªുà´²്à´²്). Then there were the stars and illumination.
Today both Onam and Christmas have lost their innocence. Flowers are bought from the market. Cribs are readymade.

When I lived in Delhi (until a few years ago), Holi and Diwali were the biggest festivals. I hid myself in my room on both occasions as my lungs were (and still are) highly sensitive to dust and smoke. Moreover, I could never understand the fun in throwing dirt on others and polluting the air with the noise and smoke of fireworks.
I now live in a village in Kerala where Holi and Diwali are not even mentioned, forget the coloured dusts and noisy crackers. In the towns nearby, students celebrate Holi just to throw dirt on one another. I understand that these youngsters are just using Holi as an excuse for drawing people’s attention to themselves. 

Festivals should bring people together in a spirit of camaraderie. What is happening nowadays is just the opposite. Festivals have become factional. People use festivals today to show off the power and glory of their community. There is something infantile about today’s celebrations, as infantile as the youngsters’ celebration of Holi in the towns near my home in Kerala.
 
A Diwali light at Sawan
PS. Written for Indispire Edition 297: “How have festival celebrations changed for you over the years?” #Change

Comments

  1. This time my daughter and I wandered the nearby streets clicking pictures of Diwali lights of the neighbourhood (in Dubai) at night and it was so beautiful to see the villas and flats adorned in colourful lights. I had even shared it in my Instagram. I haven't seen so much of this Diwali spirit in recent times esp coz as you know it is not celebrated to this extent in Kerala. There was a genuine sense of celebration probably coz they are away from their homeland and it's nostalgic. Also we saw so many people, particularly youngsters gathering and having a good time, saw that spirit of camaraderie. I think it depends on the places and the people involved.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Nostalgia adds a lot of difference to festival celebrations. The spirit of camaraderie comes easily as part of that nostalgia. When you are away from your country, your country and its culture as well as other things become more significant.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

Capital Punishment is not Revenge

Govindachamy when Kerala High Court confirmed his death sentence The Bible suggests that it is better for one man to die if that death helps others to live better [ John 11: 50 ]. Forgive me for applying that to a criminal today, though Jesus made that statement in a benign theological context. A notorious and hardcore criminal has escaped prison in Kerala. Fourteen years ago he assaulted a young girl who was travelling all alone in a late evening train, going back home from her workplace. The girl jumped out of the running train to save herself from this beast. But he jumped after her and raped her. The postmortem report suggested that he raped her twice, the second being when she had already fallen unconscious. And then he killed her hitting her head with a stone. Do you think that creature is human? I wrote about this back then: A Drop of Tear For You, Soumya . The people of Kerala demanded capital punishment for this creature, the brute called Govindachamy. He is inhu...

Gods, Guns and Missionaries

Book Review Title: Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity Author: Manu S Pillai Publisher: Penguin Random House India, 2024 Pages: 564 (about half of which consists of Notes) There never was any monolithic religion called Hinduism. Different parts of India practised Hinduism in its own ways, with its own gods and rituals and festivals. Some of these were even mutually opposed. For example, Vamana who is a revered incarnation of Vishnu in North India becomes a villain in Kerala’s Onam legends. What has become of this protean religion of infinite variety and diversity today in the hands of its ‘missionary’ political leaders? Manu S Pillai’s book ends with V D Savarkar’s contributions to the religion with a subtle hint that it is his legacy that is driving the present version of the religion in the name of Hindutva. The last lines of the book, leaving aside the Epilogue titled ‘What is Hinduism?’, are telltale. “Life did not give Savarkar all he...