From Deepawali to Halloween

Today I saw a full page advt on TOI. Normally I flip over these pages to get to the main news / editorials. Something caught my eyes in the advt. It was about festival of lights and it showed a lady with lots of gold on but the all important bindi missing.

When we grew up almost everything was expected to be done as per some shastra. There was a right way and wrong way to do anything.

A bath meant you start pouring water from head to toe rather than start with feet; washing upper part of the body using the right hand and lower part with the left. Eating meant , your left hand not touching any food or the plate. When you leave the house you say ” I’ll come’ rather than “I’ll go”.

No doubt we questioned everything; nobody stopped us from questioning. When appa used to go to the barber’s , he used to take either my brother or me; not both  . I started pestering him “why not both ” . For some days he avoided the question and one day he had to blurt out” both of you don’t get a haircut on the same day as it is done only when your father dies”. I never asked again.

At the kitchen , whether it is grinding for dosai or pouring oil around dosai on the tawa, it was always done clockwise and never the other way round. On deepawali you make 2 or 4 bakshanams and for shrardh you make three of everything , vegetables, sweetmeats etc; never never the other way round.

Why ?

Everything was clearly divided into mangalam and amangalam. (Auspicious and inauspicious) or shubh and ashubh.

I have hardly seen my sisters or mother with hair open except when they had to oil and re-plait their hair. (Only when there was a tragedy at home , hair was left un-plaited)

Let’s not gloat that today’s youngsters are liberated; may be they are free from the traditional shastras; but they have got caught in a nastier trap.

They do everything as per cool-shastra , written probably by some Swami Chillananda! Just like the binaries of earlier times, today we divide everything into cool and not so cool.

Details may vary from place to place..but there are clear divisions. Shower is cool , bucket bath is not. Open hair is cool, plaited hair or coiffures are not. Makeup is cool but bindi is not. Dating is cool, arranged marriage is not. Festivities are cool but rituals are not. In weddings, Mehndi and sangeet are cool but havan is not. Panchakacham and madisaar are cool as a fashion statement but not cool when done to follow traditions.

Sounds like an old man rambling on about the good old days when Sun was Sun and Moon was Moon.

I don’t suggest going back in time, after all, most of these rules affect the personal life of women and girls most and men are less affected and even traditional rituals by and large suit them.

Sure, we need to look ahead.

What I find disturbing is that even on a day like deepawali or wedding in the family , a basic feature indicating shubh , like a bindi is frowned upon.

Why call it deepawali at all when you find diya not cool.

Why call it a hindu wedding when a havan (and the accompanying smoke) is frowned upon. Why put the parents through events like sangeet and mehendi when the core part of the rituals “kanyadaan” is a strict no-go.

Let there be some basic decorum as one follows in the corporate world.

This is just one aspect of the issue ; who decides what is cool and what is not. Is it really the individual’s choice ? I mean the young and some not so young cool kids. (and those who say age is just a number; don’t ask their knees, knees don’t lie) . I doubt. Mostly they are dancing to the tunes set by the people who  influence social behaviour.

Social influencers do decide how you live. Apart from others, advertising world influences social behaviour the most. Commercials in turn or influenced by social behaviour. One feeds on the other and supports the other moving about like two drunk sailors who don’t know who is supporting whom.

On the  issue of bindi , I recall a story from a noted marketing guru Ambi Parameshwaran’s book For God’s sake. He had made a commercial featuring a girl in a health club. Before releasing it,  he is apprehensive if the idea would go well with the target audience as the girl was sporting a tiny bindi. Was it cool ? Do modern women (then modern) who frequent health clubs consider it cool? Those days , video editing software apps were not so advanced to edit it out. Finally he let it go as it was and it worked.

Today it may not. Our opinions are just the output of the thousands of visuals  we are bombarded with on SM , TV and now even print media. (text is passe; scope of TLDR is getting narrower and narrower) Today even a math text book is colorful and full of graphics!

 So what do we do ?

The least we can do is to stop insulting festivals and cultural, religious events by referring to them by the traditional names. We may have to coin some new words, like gold festival; like the chocolate day etc . Youngsters are quite imaginative if not well informed. As Deepawali becomes some thing celebrated with no bindi, open hair, sans diya , sans fireworks it might as well be called something else. With the kind of makeups and attires becoming cool, what comes to mind is ‘Halloween’ !