Rath...

After two weeks of continuous sunshine and summer heat, it rained  today, bringing the temperature down considerably. The day dawned cloudy, with big dark grey clouds crowding the sky, reminding me of monsoon back home.  It started pouring buckets, the parched soil of Oxford soaked up the water gratefully and the trees are back in their green glory. They no longer look tired and yellow, wilting  under the relentless heat of the sun.

A message in my inbox informed me that it is Ratha Jatra today. Ratha Jatra is the Hindu celebration when the three deity siblings Jaganath, Balaram and Subhadra get up on a magnificent chariot and go off for their annual visit to their aunt's house. The celebration originated in the Jaganath temple of Puri but spread in the rest of India as well. If you want to know more, you could check this out.

To come back to the weather, one of the folklores that I grew up with is that it always rains on the day of rath. I remember as a kid cuddling upto my mother as she read me poems from Rabindranath Tagore's Sishu. There were many a poem on rath and the rain associated with rath.

Today  in this far away land, watching the rains those far away memories floated back.

I remember childhood days when we never had any school holidays for rath. So throughout the day in school there was heavy anticipation. We would all be busy planning how to decorate the rath we would be pulling in the evening. Yes each child in Kolkata during my childhood days were given a  small chariot to decorate and pull. And if we were really lucky we would even get to buy a brand new one, specially if the old one had disintegrated. I remember more than the pujo it was the chariot pulling which generated all the excitement.

These chariots were made of plywood, loosely nailed together and brightly coloured. They disintegrated really easily too. They came in various sizes, with first, second and third and sometimes fourth levels. So there used to be an inherent competition about the length of our chariots. The most magnificent ones were the three storied ones.

So after school we would decorate the chariots with colourful papers, glitters, flowers and leaves, put in  Jaganath, Balaram and Subhadra idols, a small plate with a sweet (prasad), an incense stand with a couple of incense sticks burning (much to the horror of elders and the incessant warnings) and after a round of the house [sometimes a pround grandma would put in an one rupee coin as dakhina (offering to the God)].  I remember my father coming home early to help me with my rath. As a youngster memories of me jumping up and down with joy and not being much help in decorating the rath is still there.  After a round of the house, it was time to make a round of the neighbourhood lane and the serious business of showing off the rath to the neighbourhood children and inspecting theirs. In my case it was our compound.  Kids from other houses would also come out with their chariots and after a couple of rounds of dragging the chariots with strings (which because of its lightweight would keep tripping/falling, or the idols would fall face down or the incense stand would stumble) we would offer the prasad to each other and then return home in glory. Next day in school we would all be agog with stories of how magnificent our raths were.

The rath with all the decorations would stay for 7 days, because that is the number of days these Gods would spend in their aunt's house. Then on the 8th day it was the ulto rath (return journey). Ulto rath was not that exciting, so we would do one quick round and then dismantle the rath and keep it safe for next year.

Apart from this, another attraction of rath was the food. Papar bhaja (poppadam) and suji ir halua (suji ka halwa) were must for rath. Also in Rashbehari there used to be a rath er mela (fair in celebration of rath). Among other things I remember the huge papor bhajas (they used to have huge speciality popadams) and also the nurseries. Since July is serious monsoon time in India with a lot of planting happening, these fairs would have huge nurseries selling all kinds of plants. How green and vibrant those plants looked to my young eyes.

I do not remember when I stopped getting excited about rath. Somewhere around teenage I guess.  But the younger memories are vibrant enough to last forever.

Bhopal Gas Tragedy....

Growing up in the 80s and 90s in India, we kind of grew up with the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. It happened when we were in primary school, for me it happened the year my brother was born. Before that my association with Bhopal was through my General Knowledge class where I was taught that it was the capital city of Madhya Pradesh. So when the newspapers carried news about Bhopal I was naturally interested. It was a name I had learned recently and I wanted to know what the newspapers were saying about this city. I was too young to realize the full import of the incident, though I remember my mother explaining that many people had died. As a child I was fascinated by the fact that many animals had died too.  One newspaper image still lingers in my memory, of that a small boy curled up dead clutching a dead animal, probably a goat. What a tragedy it was...the nation was stunned, its citizens shocked...newspapers were full of it, whenever elders met they discussed it. Political parties made full use of it, indulging in blame game and the Communists blamed the US imperialism and  the central government to their hearts' content.

Years passed, the civil society movement around the tragedy grew as we were growing up... the anniversary was commemorated each year, there were rallies, candle light processions, gheraos, protests and people wore black bands to show solidarity and news papers carried articles to trigger public memory. NGOs mushroomed working with the victims and fighting for justice. So the incident lived on, sometimes ebbing away, sometimes coming to the forefront. The court cases started, and along came the controversies and the frustration at the long winded judicial system. Various studies started coming out, how the health of the population was affected, how the environment was affected. Two messages came out very strongly-- how government, bureaucracy  and Union Carbide were responsible and how people were pinning their hopes on the judicial system to bring justice.

Years later in college and then later in universities, I interacted with groups working with the victims,  watched theatrical  performances  on the disaster, art exhibitions. Studying human rights the case came up for discussion in the course of my study. For me it was reliving the incident. I got to know more facts about the tragedy which had happened years ago, an incident which was not personal yet deeply personal, a tragedy which did not touch me and mine, yet had an enormous impact on me.

Over the years I have followed the fight for justice, most times through news papers, sometimes by wearing the black band, or donating a meager amount of money or visiting a public meetings, lectures or debates.

It was not only the fight for justice for the people affected, for our generation this fight was to affirm our faith in our justice system. Some horrible tragedy had happened when we were kids and we had expected that by the time we grew up justice would be delivered! What a wrong expectation that was!

Way too many things had already gone wrong, too many mistakes by our bureaucrats and government, we thought that the judiciary would poke its finger in the right place and pin responsibility onto the guilty. The judiciary was to be our savior. Because otherwise who else was left? The next step is the dreaded 'rebellion' by the people driven by frustration and voicelessness. No we did not want that...we wanted to have  our faith in the Indian Constitution and the rule of law reaffirmed. Today's verdict is such a massive let down...I am not angry, I am disappointed. My first instinct was to ask myself whether the Chief Judicial Magistrate is under political pressure or God forbid taken a bribe? Then I recoil from my own thoughts, I do not want to reach that level of cynicism. I am part of young India, we need to take the nation forward, not give up on it.

Somehow in this rush to be developed, the poor has gone out of favour in India. The poor and the disadvantaged are considered unpleasant aspects of the nation who need to be swept under the carpet or pushed into another hastily patched slum which is more like a black hole. All we want to show the world is our IT engineers, our rich industrialists with unprecedented personal riches and our English speaking, accent faking youth working in call centres. Thankfully India is much, much more than that and we Indians are proud of our diverse background. So what if we are developing and riddled by multitude of problems, we have our dignity and our faith for better future. If only our politicians, bureaucrats and judiciary believed in it too!

Missing out on celebrations....

I was sad missing out on celebrating kali pujo/diwali and then bhaiphota/bhaiduj. This is what I hate about staying abroad, the dates just merge into one another and the festivals just become a face book status message. You call home only to miss home all the more. Diwali night I stood at our window a long time, there were occasional crackers in the sky. Flashes of past diwali kept coming back.

Ever since I have grown up I don't much enjoy crackers. They are bad polluters. But cut out the crackers and I love Kali pujo (worship) nights. Bengalis worship Ma Kali the day before diwali day and does the rest of bursting crackers and decorating their houses with candles and lamps. Two days before the Kali pujo there is the night when you have to light seven candles and then the evening before Kali pujo fourteen candles. This is done to scare away ghosts. It is believed that Ma Kali is the violent avatar of Ma Durga and she got so mad that she was dancing naked with human skulls. Her dancing was about to bring an end to this world so Lord Shiva her husband had to lie down, she stepped on him and like a good Hindu wife, felt deeply ashamed and her tongue sticks out as a reaction of her shame and of course her mad dancing stops and the world is not destroyed. Bengalis have captured this naked goddess with her hair open, skulls in hand, tongue sticking out standing on her husband pose and this is the idol we worship on the day of Kali pujo. According to folklore demons and ghosts accompany her when she comes to the earth to be worshipped. Hence all the light and the crackers to drive the demons away.

In my childhood there was a certain thrill about this pujo. You never know which demon or ghost would choose to visit you or your house. Elders would add to the mystery and tell stories from the past. I remember pestering my father for these stories and as the stories unfolded my eyes would almost pop out and shivers would go down my spine. So the night of the pujo is always associated in my mind with an anticipation-- an anticipation of the evil....I almost waited for the worst to happen but it never did. From my childhood I remember going cracker shopping with my father...there were certain grown up crackers and certain kid crackers. Amongst us cousins and friends a competition would start as to who could burst the grown up crackers. It was the opportunity to show how brave and grown up you were, no place for the weak hearted. Once I grew up, my brother and then my cousins continued this cracker excitement business. The last time I was home, my young cousin of about 7 years got a huge load of crackers but was scared stiff to burst them. So instead my dad ended up bursting the crackers!

The day after kali pujo, North Indians celebrate as diwali or the festival of lights with all that cracker bursting. This is followed by bhaiphota/bhai duj, this is a festival where sisters pray for long life of brothers/cousins. During the ceremony brothers sit on a small mat on the floor, while sisters arrange a plate of sweet meats and another with chandan/sandalwood paste, there is a small poem that the sisters chant while they put a chandan tikka on the forehead of their brothers. It is a sweet festival, in my house it is a major celebration where the whole family (about 60 odd people) gather and gifts are exchanged among brothers and sisters. Oh grand daughters pray for long life of grandfathers while grandmothers do the same for their grandsons. It is one of my favourite celebrations, a day you earmark for your family.

The photograph displayed at the beginning of the post was taken from the following site-- http://i213.photobucket.com/albums/cc78/myscrado/durga/pkl_03.jpg