Farah Baria
Indian Express, October 26, 2007
Instead of submitting meekly to this sound and fury, we need to ensure festivals signify the sublime.
You will get much further with the Lord if you learn not to offend His ears. I wish someone would convert Henry Higgins’s cryptic suggestion to Eliza Doolittle into the Eleventh Commandment. Or, better still, that last resort of the desperate citizen, a PIL. Reason? My family has just spent the better part of a month in enforced silence, our voices drowned by noisy Ganapati immersions, Durga puja pandals, Navratri garbas, Ramzan feasting and Id celebrations.
This annual affliction is not just personal. Come the festive season and Mumbai turns catatonic, deafened and paralysed by propitiations to the Almighty — the price we pay for being India’s melting pot, I guess. Holy September was particularly hellish. Suburban commuters resigned to the thrombotic two-hour ride on the city’s main artery doubled their quota of penance. It now took four. We obediently belly-crawled past the Siddhivinayak Ganesh temple — ironically dedicated to the Remover of Obstacles — before weaving through Ramzan revellers at Mahim and navigating the Mount Mary feast at Bandra. Scrupulously secular, that’s our city.
This month, 80,000 devotees turned up at the Mahalaxmi mandir every day during Dussehra, obliging motorists to file past at the respectful pace of 2 km/hour, aided by 300 ineffectual policemen. Some 30,000 others trooped to the Haji Ali dargah nearby for Id. And, next month, we can look forward to being asphyxiated by smoke from Diwali fireworks.
Inconvenient? Nah! In a city of 15 million, festivals must presumably be loud enough, and boisterous enough, for Heaven to take notice. The spectacle naturally supersedes the spiritual. But, more disturbingly, so does the political. With every community competing for the Lord’s attention, celebrations have become a demonstration of communal muscle. And aggression, wrapped in rowdy revelry, is unmistakable. During Navratri on the Panchvati Express, a group of passengers performed the morning aarti, complete with camphor and incense sticks, with a supreme disregard for safety. And at the disputed Durgadi Fort in Kalyan, Hindus and Muslims ‘celebrated’ Navratri and Ramzan together, separated by police barricades.
No wonder, then, that festivals have become the new hunting grounds for predatory politicians, with parties spending an estimated Rs 100 crore this year to sponsor Mumbai’s 8,500 Ganesh pandals. The 10 pm curfew was also obligingly extended to midnight, but predictably no one offered to pick up the tab for polluting the sea with 1.07 lakh idols, pay overtime to 11,000 constables, or compensate for the man hours lost to bottlenecks.
We are, after all, a secular country. Except that this constitutional right to worship is insidiously encroaching on personal and civic rights. Like, what about our basic right to skip the party, thank you very much? Or our right to peace and quiet in our own homes? To freedom of movement? Or plain old-fashioned respect for personal privacy? We need to defend these by law. Instead of submitting meekly to the sound and fury, we need to ensure that festivals can still signify the sublime.
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