The
Diwali festival was raising its celebratory hood with bang, smoke, splashes and
splendor. We bombard, more than the firecrackers, each others with the messages
of ‘Happy Diwali’. It is however another matter that in its modern avatar the
great myth with its practical substance has been robbed of its true humanistic
essence under the internecine attack of constantly aggravating pathos and
passion of the modern generation. All those desirous of having a big bang in
life get a suitable bombarding opportunity on this day. When people literally
surpass each other in a mock war to split eardrums and leave the air polluted
to the hilt, it is no longer in commemoration of the completion of that great
task undertaken by Lord Sri Rama validating the eventually succeeding nature of
the good over the evil. Most of the revelers in fact grin like the progenies in
Ravana’s army. The meek mythological murmur is painfully pinched down by the
evil’s fire-banging spirit lurking around on the rooftops on this darkest of
the night in the year.
On
this day, Lakshmi (the Goddess of wealth and prosperity) is worshipped and true
to its nature the Goddess blesses a section of the trado-religious section of
all the destitute head-bent humanity. These are the traders, entrepreneurs,
people of enterprise and business. For almost a fortnight preceding the
festival, bazaars, stalls in narrow streets, shopping malls, mega malls,
shopping centres and sweet shops are tested to the capacity of their salesmanship.
Festival enthused people just beat each other in taking the traders’ profit to
a new, newer and newest pinnacle. During evenings the provisions and the prodigious
Lalaji burst out of the narrow confines
of little shops and get adjusted on the stalls encroaching onto the narrow
walkways among the beehives of shops. People just unmindfully bump into each
other in the mass trail. Even vehicles baulk, screech and squeeze to have their
mechanic share in the fun and funstry from the side of the machine world. Especially
the ladies and girls attired for a festive outdoor in jeans, colorful tops,
fancy salwaar kameez, flowing duppatas
and trailing pallus hypnotically move
along this logjam, their minds buzzing with indecision regarding what to
purchase and what not. In between are the rangeela
elements who frustrated and deprived of female proximity born of the famed sexual
divide in India seek solace and scent females from the closest quarters, the
world from porn movies giving them glimpses of what lies beyond this.
Frustration taking sadistic sips from whatever chance bumps, pats on the buts,
brush against the shoulder and even pinch at the most delicate parts.
The
shop-fronts decorated with lighting patterns galore as the high temples of the
great Indian mass-psychology driven consumerism. The firmly believing devotees
meanwhile with wads of money in their wallets moving in a queue to shop
mechanically like bottles get along on a conveyer belt to be labeled exactly
the same. Truly the festival colors everybody in the same color despite gravest
of differences among all. The high priests meanwhile—the shopkeepers, hawkers,
vendors—very expertly perform the plundering rituals of businessmanship. Market
becomes the new Dharma. Its
scriptural book has the pious injunction: Purchase as much as possible on Diwali
eve even leading to your beggarly status during the non-festive days!
Uncountable schemes, discounts, credits, cuts, offers and coupons make it seem
like the modern ways of subtle pick pocketing! This great predatory peek in people’s
wallets using the knife of market principles, using surgically clean and expert
fingers by the hand of market consumerism! This is expert encroachment into the
corridors of mythology to enlarge its market domain.
The
sweet makers start storing the dish and delicacies weeks ahead for there will
be a huge rush. Indians are paranoid in certain mass behaviour. For petty
selfishness ranging from spitting, peeing on public places reaching to life
threatening acts of food adulteration (like fake mawa, urea in milk, poisonous colors in sweetmeats) they behave as
easily as just doing the early morning ritual, permitted, allowed both by
nature and society. The perishable stale products are attractively packaged to
go into religiously blinded guts. On Dhan
Teras it is considered auspicious to buy gold and silver. The great myth propagated
by the maker of the God, the Super God, the smart selfish mankind. More than
any God, it is the jewelers who get propitiated on this day. Inside the glass
fronted welcoming exteriors, exquisitely plush furnished interiors, under the
glare of all those jewellery items lined almost from the floor to the ceiling,
big bloated ladies and gentry religiously put budgetary caution to winds. They
stab in their wallets to get finally a bit of pinch on their real skin. Here
thousands do not matter. Outside a famished, sunken, skeleton of an old beggar
is a pariah and they feel like getting a heart attack even at the thought of
giving ten rupees to that unfortunate creature. ‘We do not support beggary,’
they simply quip and take to their smart heels.
A
day before the pious night itself, the night of Diwali, there was an unseasonal
rainstorm. It occurred at the worst time it can. It stole the festive glitters
from the eyes of at least one community, the farmers. Basmati paddy just two
weeks away from harvesting, with its grain heads bulging with the pearls of the
farmer’s eyes and other varieties (like Sharbati, 1121) already under the
process of harvesting, all and more got whiplashed suddenly by the weather spoilsport.
Many farming dreams were broken.
The
next morning the farmers found the crops flattened. Farmers just got busy in
using their mundane calculation abilities to estimate the scale of loss in
monetary terms.
‘In
the standing crop the loss isn’t much because the yellow traces had started. The
grain has been completely formed,’ one quipped.
‘But
still it is a big loss. All those grain-heads and spikes which get buried and
get into contact with the damp ground will turn black. It’s at least 20% crop
loss,’ the other protested.
‘No
no it’s too high. It cannot be more than 10%,’ the simple calculations went
forth.
So
the farmers debated about the loss. What else could be done? It is the irony
with the farmer that both God and the market seldom get propitiated at the same
time. They take turns to fuck the farmers’ fate. Just once in a cycle of let us
say five years both God and the market bless the farmers concurrently to give
them some monetary chance to help somebody go for long-pending house reconstruction,
marry off a daughter waiting her dowry to be purchased, buy some long-dreamt
electronic gazette, etc., etc.
With
fluctuations in their loss figures, their participation in the great and
glittering festival time market decorated in cities and towns went up and down.
And during those three or four final hours of Diwali celebrations the
victorious firecrackers ruled the sky. These were the stars creating a lower
vault of human aspirations. With their flash, boom, burst and brilliance, they
even puffed out the flickering, faded, silently smiling lamp far away by a poor
threshold, a farmer who had possibly lost too much in the storm.
