Bihu Musings

This is my 'fortieth year to heaven'.Indeed a long enough time to do some stock-taking.During these forty years' round up of my life,three books have robustly influenced my mental world. One of them is Schumacher's 'Small is beautiful.' I draw your attention to the following lines from the book: 'The prestige carried by people in modern industrial society varies in inverse proportion to their closeness to actual productions'.

The Bihu is a festival that has evolved out of the rituals connected with 'Fertility cult'.Primarily it is a festival which is inextricably bound up with agriculture or with the people engaged in agricultural activities. In other words this festival carries within itself a world view based on an all pervading spirit in nature.
But the 'heady paroxysm of sumptuous rituals' with which the Bihu is celebrated in our city hardly contains even a trace element of that. On the contrary it is devalued, debased and highly commercialized in the hands of materialist and spiritually bankrupt(by spirituality I do not mean rituals) city dwellers.

The so called artists who blabber till the dawn breaks are miles farther from real production. The girls whose dances are sophisticatedly choreographed for public (mainly man) gaze have never seen a paddy field let alone doing chores agricultural. The farmer who toils from dawn to dusk and as a result ages prematurely, is banished from this scheme of things. And the rest snatches all the glory.

It really pains me.

Emtional distance and mobile phone

The advent of mobile phones signalize a remarkable change in our daily lives. A day without this small gadget is unthinkable.

Besides many other things, mobile phones have significantly narrowed the emotional distance of our hearts.

My family and I live apart in a distance of 120 Kms.The mobile phone that I use cannot reduce this physical distance. But emotionally I am always with them. In other words I carry my family and the dear and near ones(You are included) in my pocket. Of course metaphorically. Whenever I have the urge to talk(You are included again) to them, I fish out my mobile phone and my wish is instantly realized.(We are living in an age of instancy--instant coffee, instant noodles...right?) Be it on a busy street or in my small cozy room or during a comfort break in prolonged official meeting.

Now read the following poem by late Bireswar Baruah roughly translated by yours truly:

' Rays from the stars travel for many light- years to reach us.
I get your news from a different town.
The gap between what I get and what I do not,
seems to be a distance of light-years.'

Surely the poem talks about emotional distance in pre-mobile times.(Bireswar Baruah did not have a mobile when he wrote this I am sure).

A person like me who sleeps with the mobile phone is incapable of comprehending such a thought. And I am sure 'I am not the only one'.

Mobiles phones are bound to rob us of such transcendent poetry.