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. Deepa GopalNovember 5, 2019 at 4:58 PM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 5, 2019 at 8:45 PM

      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

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let
25 comments
Read more

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
37 comments
Read more

William and the autumn of life

William and I were together only for one year, but our friendship has grown stronger year after year. The duration of that friendship is going to hit half a century. In the meanwhile both he and I changed many places. William was in Kerala when I was in Shillong. He was in Ireland when I was in Delhi. Now I am in Kerala where William is planning to migrate back. We were both novices of a religious congregation for one year at Kotagiri in Tamil Nadu. He was older than me by a few years and far more mature too. But we shared a cordial rapport which kept us in touch though we went in unexpected directions later. William’s conversations had the same pattern back then and now too. I’d call it Socratic. He questions a lot of things that you say with the intention of getting to the depth of the matter. The last conversation I had with him was when I decided to stop teaching. I mention this as an example of my conversations with William. “You are a good teacher. Why do you want to stop
15 comments
Read more

Thomas the Saint

AI-generated image His full name was Thomas Augustine. He was a Catholic priest. I knew him for a rather short period of my life. When I lived one whole year in the same institution with him, I was just 15 years old. I was a trainee for priesthood and he was many years my senior. We both lived in Don Bosco school and seminary at a place called Tirupattur in Tamil Nadu. He was in charge of a group of boys like me. Thomas had little to do with me directly as I was under the care of another in-charge. But his self-effacing ways and angelic smile drew me to him. He was a living saint all the years I knew him later. When he became a priest and was in charge of a section of a Don Bosco institution in Kochi, I met him again and his ways hadn’t changed an iota. You’d think he was a reincarnation of Jesus if you met him personally. You won’t be able to meet him anymore. He passed away a few years ago. One of the persons whom I won’t ever forget, can’t forget as long as the neurons continu
16 comments
Read more

Uriel the gargoyle-maker

Uriel was a multifaceted personality. He could stab with words, sting like Mike Tyson, and distort reality charmingly with the precision of a gifted cartoonist. He was sedate now and passionate the next moment. He could don the mantle of a carpenter, a plumber, or a mechanic, as situation demanded. He ran a school in Shillong in those days when I was there. That’s how I landed in the magic circle of his friendship. He made me a gargoyle. Gradually. When the refined side of human civilisation shaped magnificent castles and cathedrals, the darker side of the same homo sapiens gave birth to gargoyles. These grotesque shapes were erected on those beautiful works of architecture as if to prove that there is no human genius without a dash of perversion. In many parts of India, some such repulsive shape is placed in a prominent place of great edifices with the intention of warding off evil or, more commonly, the evil eye. I was Uriel’s gargoyle for warding off the evil eye from his sc
12 comments
Read more