Janmashtami as I understand it

I am no philosopher but know better than assuming that a term means the same thing to everyone who hears of it. For me, and I suspect to many similarly confused souls, something, anything, means little more than the series of associations it brings to my mind. Each and every referent, such as Janmashtami, perhaps makes sense in two ways. The more sophisticated minds can quickly grasp the essential, abstract values underlying this annual celebration of the birth of lord Krishna, who stand for many things in Hindu religion, philosophy, statecraft and diplomacy. They can, for instance, understand the celebration of love, of growing up in an inhospitable atmosphere, of having to overcome almost insurmountable hardships before graduating to becoming a darling of the masses, and so on, all encompassed in the early life of this many splendored deity, who ,incidentally, is black in skin color.

I do not so easily follow these complexities. How is it possible, I wonder, to have so many ways to celebrate the same universal values like love, forbearance, resourcefulness and so on? In other words, if all of us can readily understand these qualities, why do we need so many different occasions and styles to reaffirm them? In extension, I wonder, if it is possible to suggest that there is more to the forms of such celebrations than meets the eye? Can’t the ways such celebrations are observed reveal to us some more humble, more intimate, and therefore more illuminating, local and micro-level realities?

This leads me to bring on the ways Janmashtami made sense to me when I was younger and the only way it still does. This indeed may be a second way of things making sense to the less intelligent, and the less gifted members of the multitude, who somehow always fail to see the deeper values behind such communitarian celebrations. More specifically for me Janmashtami meant precisely two things. First, this was the day the potters ceremonially cut the bamboo pieces, that in turn went into the making of the skeleton of the Durga idol that we worshipped so devoutly, and with so much pomp, in our para, during the autumn months of September and October.

The actual puja lasted no more than four days, and community feasts perhaps two more days, but preparations would start well in advance. And Janmashtami officially marked the beginning of these preparations. The bamboos would subsequently be pruned and sliced into the right shapes; these would in turn be tied with ropes to each other in various angles and joints, so that finally they looked like a skeletal structure of the goddess, her four children and her combatant, Mahisasura the demon who emerged out of a buffalo. Let me not fill the pages with minute descriptions of the stages through which these isolated bamboo pieces were transformed, over the next month and a half, into the composite structure of the goddess, her children and her tormentor, all crafted to perfection and decked with the loveliest and most colorful of dresses and ornaments. Suffice it to say that going to the chandimandap and gaping at these potters work, bit by bit, and actually be witness to so much visual beauty emerge out of such ordinary material ingredients, was a such a wonder to my young mind that nothing else seemed to matter, not even pending studies, hunger or repeated calls from my mother to come home to eat and be a good boy. Those potters, who only did their work and got paid for it, were magicians to me. They could effortlessly do what I could not even imagine myself being able to do, ever. I just could not take my eyes off their wizardry. It is this admiration of excellence, this unadulterated sense of wonder at watching someone else excelling at his craft and not feeling bad at all, that I so sorely miss today, within my own self as well as in so many around you and me. I no longer feel so very happy when someone else does well, however hard I try. Why must someone else doing well make me feel inadequate, even though I try to overcome such pettiness all the time? I don’t know but let me only promise to myself this Janmashtami that I will try harder and talk more to that chronologically younger, more wonderstruck self of mine.

The second thing that my Janmashtami meant to me is a much looked-forward-to lunch invitation. There was this family in the para who observed some sort of a puja on that day and called all the children over for lunch. The deity they worshipped was called Gopal, a miniature bronze idol of a crawling Krishna, with a peacock feather tied to his head with a cute blue bandana. They probably reasoned that feeding children who had not yet crossed the age of ten or so would earn them some divine blessing and so some twenty or thirty children would be called over for a vegetarian lunch that used to be a fairly elaborate spread. I do not recall the individual dishes so many years later, but Khichuri, a number of fried vegetables, some sort of a cabbage curry, papad, tomato-chutney, and some payas were invariably served.

I always avoided the brinjals, largely because I found the seeds creepy. I feasted on potato and the Khichuri and coveted the papad. By the time they came up to the cabbage curry, I would have had my stomach filled choc-a-bloc and almost always left the chutney and the payas alone. There were a couple of years when I made bold to gobble the couple of pantuas that they had made available. But that does not appear to be a regular feature. Probably someone from the family had made some unexpected gains and decided to thank their Gopal by feeding local children some pantuas.

It hurt me profoundly when I got to know for the first time that they had not called me over. It did not occur to me that they no longer thought I was a kid. After all, I had just stopped being a kid, and it is usually the elders who feed you who decide when you are no longer a kid. I don’t remember now but I must have felt very sad when I saw some of my contemporaries telling me in the morning of the feast that they would attend it in the afternoon. Admittedly, there was no uniformity in the selection of kids, for many of those who continued to be invited were elder to me in age.

There were so many other anomalies in the function that I discovered later. To be invited over, you had not only to be a kid, you had also to belong to a middle class family like them. Many poorer, ‘lower caste’ boys with whom we used to play cricket—and who always had to volunteer when the ball would dive into a pond or get lost into bushes—were never called over as a matter of course. There are so many other things about the way we grew up, things that appeared so obvious and normal then, that I find very strange today.

Like how people decide who is closer to you and who is not. There was this aunt who was a distant cousin of my father. She was married to one of the most famous doctors in Calcutta. During the pujas, she would gift some dress or the other to all the children in the house. Ours was a moderately large place and there were some seven or eight of us growing up together. Most of ‘us’ were children of her ‘own’ brothers, only I being fairly distant in terms of ‘blood’ relation. If a boy of my age would get a baby suit bought from ,say, a famous kids’ store in Calcutta, I’d always receive one that appeared to have been picked up from a local shop. And when she decided that I had grown up, I stopped receiving her puja gifts altogether.

Today, these things appear very normal and reasonable but back then it looked like someone had been sidelining me for no fault of mine. Today I suppose I understand that a rich man throws about gifts to display his status and that he would positively discriminate between the kids of his rich friends/relatives and the kids of his poor friends/relatives. I still do not entirely understand why it is done but know enough that it is some sort of an investment. The ranking is based on an estimate of future returns. In other words, when she gave me a cheap t-shirt, she was reasoning that my family would be of little use to hers in future anyway. By still giving me the thing she had actually been making a speculative investment in case someone in my family achieved some renown later. But by the time I grew in size, the price of clothes grew prohibitive enough for her to continue to make such speculative investments where the hopes of returns were abysmally low.

This is how we all continue to rank our friends and relatives, however much we protest our desire not to do so. We all throw up our hands in despair and say that our situations have forced us to be petty. The truth is we are all petty anyways. But hey, what if we were to make some investment on an underdog? Just how many more years will I continue to blame everyone else for my own mistakes? Let’s try cheering for the underdogs. I just can’t handle this hierachization of human relations but also can’t help but accept that it makes some sense. Janmashtami for me is thus all about struggling to refuse to believe that I have grown up.