Festivities of Folly

I have a huge problem with the manner in which festivals and ‘joyful’ occasions are celebrated around me. And when I say that, I mean it. Therefore, my acquaintances see me participating in all celebrations with reluctance and apprehension. Sometimes, I think, the problem lies within me. Maybe, I think too much.

Allow me to explain my problem in detail by ranting about the festival of lights and shubh-laabh, Diwali. I begin with the assumption that the point of celebration of all kinds is to have a good and memorable time with the ones you love and catch up with some mad moments of laughter and decent debauchery in the process.

The only thing that I like about Diwali is that it gives an excuse to all households to cleanse themselves of unwanted and unnecessary objects. Well, that it also gives an excuse to slothful souls like me to procrastinate the cleaning-up and washing-down is an altogether different matter. The celebration for Diwali starts many days before the D-day with the aforementioned cleaning of the house by the family members.

After a family has lightened its abode of dust and filth, it starts planning about gifts and sweets that need to be distributed to friends and relatives. So, old lockers are opened up, useless gifts of previous years are scrounged out and minds are pressed into recalling who had given which gift. After these imprudent persons are identified (sometimes with the assistance of dilapidated diaries) to everyone’s satisfaction, which gift should be given to whom is decided. This practice is sometimes used to take revenge from that disagreeable distant relative who happens to share the city with you for gifting you that useless cutlery set on the last family wedding.

After everything is neatly chalked out and gifts are attractively wrapped in glossy packing papers, begins the magnanimous and exceedingly fatiguing task of visiting the people who you ‘wish’ to wish ‘Happy Diwali’ and taking gifts and sweets to their places. These hurried visits generally and to the best of my knowledge comprise of some forced laughter, some superfluous pleasantries, some high-on-calories consumption and conversations about how crowded the roads are, how hot the weather still is and how adulterated local sweets generally are. These visits are ubiquitously followed by an obvious anticipation of a well-armed return-visit of the ‘visited’ household if the same hasn’t already been done. Some experienced people make these visits after Diwali, much to the relief of their relatives and friends, and profess in eloquent terms their wisdom in being late and thereby avoiding exacting traffic snarls.

After or during these visits, idols of the needed goddess and lord are purchased from the market and placed safely at a secured place until the puja-time arrives. When the big day finally arrives, everyone invests in looking cheerful and beautiful in the morning and prepares himself or herself for a busy and a heavy-on-work day. Generally, while the day is spent by the women of the house in preparing the evening feast, the girls of the house spend their day-time energy in making a rangoli in the veranda and the evening-time energy in lighting the diyas and decorating the house. The men and the boys spend their day in bringing material required for puja, evening feast, rangoli, decorations and so on and going to the site of family business and doing a small puja there.

When all the work is done and after the sun has set, each person in the house goes to his/her respective wardrobe, digs out that expensive and slightly uncomfortable dress that he/she had bought/got stitched on the occasion of the last family function, looks at it in nostalgia and then spends the next hour in dressing up and observing himself/herself in the mirror in satisfaction or sulkiness depending on the prevailing circumstances.

After this, the family sits down in a well-lit room to do the puja. The men do the puja first and then make way for the women. The puja is done rather fastidiously in order to impress Lakshmiji and even Ganeshji and in hope that the prosperity of the house will only be positively affected in the coming months. After the puja is completed and the younger lot of the house has been given some cash by the elder lot, the family sits down to consume the dinner during which loud and celebratory calls are made to relatives living in other cities in order to wish them and tell them that it is because of their blessings that their household is surviving in happiness and prosperity.

Post consuming the dinner and the sweets, everyone changes into light cotton clothes to prepare himself or herself for the customary fireworks celebration in the veranda or the terrace or even the street before the house. After the family has polluted the air and the area around to its contentment, everyone either retires to the main hall to gamble or to their respective rooms to sleep on the new bed-sheets, sometimes after taking a Disprin or a Crocin Pain Relief.

In this mad operation to make sure that everything happens in accordance to the centuries-old conventions, most people around me forget the motive of celebrating the occasion. And this irks me, since I am left with no choice but to become a part of such celebrations. That I like to believe that I am an atheist only worsens the matter. The only solace that I am left with is that one day, things will change. That one day, I will have the power to change things.