Celebrate Sensibly

Editorial:
It’s Biswakarma Puja on Saturday, a celebration which has been embraced with much exuberance by vehicle owners and drivers in Sikkim. A visit to the various pandals, and an introduction to the different spins added to the festival always make for an entertaining day out. This festival also marks the start of festive season which cram the calendar with red towards the end of the year. The time is also perhaps right for the traffic personal and “celebration organising committees” to include better policing against rash driving and effective counselling to ensure safe celebrations.
Casualties triggered by the raucousness [on the road] that even religious occasions spark nowadays need to be contained. Biswakarma Puja is the right time to begin with efforts to do so, since Sunday will see the roads clogged with revellers rising from late-night celebrations to a frenetic morning. The drive taking the statues for ‘bisarjan’ are invariably unsafe with showboating by overloaded and noisy vehicles having become the norm. Let us accept the irony that we don’t know how to celebrate sensibly and these occasions, even when religious and cultural, invariably pull along accidents, confrontations and brawls. This need not be so, and if the authorities and the civil society begin the right initiatives now itself, the period up to the New Year could pass in healthier fun.
Since one is on ‘celebrations’, one cannot ignore the growing criticism of too much pop having infiltrated tradition. While purists will have problems with even the most minor deviation from ‘prescribed traditions’, even lay people have now begun expressing distaste for what are, admittedly, wanton diversions from even the essence of the various occasions. Whatever relevance a special day has is lost after the first few hours when the prayers are offered; from there on, most community celebrations, Biswakarma Puja included, dissipate into a picnic. To each his own style, but when this style of observance starts interfering with the security and comfort of the people, it becomes disconcerting. The degeneration of almost every festival and cultural event into just another excuse for excesses is indeed discomfiting. And Biswakarma Puja is only a minor celebration compared the extended binges that will begin soon – there is Dasain, then Teohar, then Losoong, Chirstmas, New Year... Crime might not spike, but social nuisance can be expected to go on a high graph. No festival should leave behind such a disturbing aftertaste. And now that there is still time to prepare well, someone should initiate the process...