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.
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