Festivals are the time when I get really homesick.
Even when I am home
Since I can remember the “festive season” has been given so
much importance in our lives that I feel kind of sick of it sometimes. When I
was little, there used to be this forced assignment in school every year (for
at least four years in a row!) to write about your favorite holiday. Every
bloody year, there was this same loathsome task of adorning our brainless
essays with all the possible adjectives for lights and colors. It was not even
considered a possibility that a child might not have a ‘favorite’ holiday where
he/she would go absolute nuts and the parents would be on board with the whole
insanity thing for it was the holidays of course!
Today, in the market driven world, the ‘festival season’
seems to have become a pathetic diminution of what else can be sold and how. I
will never be able to understand why on this earth is a pack of pink heart
shaped marshmallows a better way of expressing love than the good old love letter? I
do realize that I sound like a very bitter, anti- festival kind of a person but
somehow I don’t derive even half as much joy from lighting a cracker as I do
from giving an extra fifty bucks to the rickshaw puller on the eve of Diwali.
He, I feel, might be a believer in the lights and color stuff and the fifty bucks may mean
something to him.
Once, a friend was psycho analyzing me and he came to the conclusion that owing to lack of any ‘happy memories’ of my childhood with respect to any festivals and because I once burnt my hand on Diwali and was thrown in a very big pool one Holi, these negative feelings have stuck with me. I was so gob smacked with his bizarre take on the whole thing that nothing but expletives came out of my mouth for a while. Firstly, I don’t like being psycho-analyzed and on top of that, try giving my story a Freudian twist, I will choke you to death! Besides, that pool was a fun thing and all the happening kids were there. As for the burn, I wasn’t a big fan of that but I like the smell of gunpowder. So much for Freud then!
I think about it every year and I can’t fathom why my
consumption of chocolates and cheese increases manifolds during this time of
the year. The mighty Beatles said that all
we need is love and I guess I have that in my life but I swear to God,
the sugarcoated pleasantries of absolute strangers, the fireworks, the works
drive me to my edge! Maybe for a cynic from the anti festival brigade, like me a little more something is required. Maybe the little more something is a pint of vodka so that i can 'drown' myself in the festive spirits as the saying goes. Pun intended Who can say?
And I guess there has to be something that engages an entire community, an entire nation in the conspiracy of love. There is so much of hatred in the world otherwise. We all need to get a grip, have a common reason of celebration and indulge in some collective amnesia from our less than perfect lives. On that note I wish everyone a very happy festival season!
