The din and debris of devotion

Well done! We have outdone ourselves this Ganpati immersion day. Bettered our own record in harassing people first with demands of donations, then by blasting the place with deafening noise, defiling our rivers and any other hapless water body that we chance upon…and all in the name of ‘religious sentiments’. And now, the crowning glory: the administration itself has smiled feebly and looked the other way. “We don’t want to hurt religious sentiments,” they say officially, by way of explanation as to why they could not and will not stop the lawlessness that pretends to be devotion in our cities and towns. So we have come full circle: the State and its machinery, supposed to be an ‘elder’ who knows better, is simply unable and unwilling to guide its citizens towards some civility and civic-ness in our celebrations. An elder usually knows when someone is going out-of-hand and overboard, and has the wisdom as well as the gumption to stand up and say it. And, importantly, this elder has its hands strengthened by rules, regulations, laws, and also the small but insistent voices of other thinking people who refuse to equate bhakti with fouling up the environment. And yet the Pune city administration, the elder, chooses to invoke none of these when it comes to the safeguarding of the common good. It would be funny if it was not so sad and revolting: people sanctimoniously reciting mantras laced heavily with references to river goddesses, while they stand ankle deep in that very river, now turbid with sewage and other wastes. And they add devotedly to the gluck with their own flowers, dyes, rotting fruit, and the idol itself. On top of it all, this detritus is neatly packed into plastic bags and THEN flung into the river. So that thousands of these bags sit there in testimony to how tidily devout they are. And the ‘city fathers’ begin to buy into the myth that all this itself is religiosity, and should not be interfered with! Not a good sign of our civilization (or lack thereof) at all. It brings to mind those dysfunctional families in which the loudest, brashest, and nastiest person is allowed to time and again abuse his mother, rob her, and hurry her to an early grave, all the while shouting abuses at other family members. While the patriarch looks on and says indulgently ‘karnay do, karnay do’- either too afraid or too shortsighted to stop the delinquent-rogue, pull him off the road, and tell him what’s what, for the good of the whole family. And so we live with it all. Every festival season, there is a growing number of people who simply lock up their homes, take their babies and old with them, and find some place that religion is not being belted out in this in-your-face megawatt version, during the Ganpati immersion, Navratri and Diwali days. Just quietly go away till the fervour subsides. Does that mean that we are just very tolerant people? Or does that make us people with no voice and choice, or does that make us simply aliens in our own cities, I don’t know. The late nineteen sixties and seventies saw the coining of a new phrase: ‘brain drain’. Which meant that young, well-qualified people took one look at what was going on around them in India, saw the western world as a much better option, and simply left. Brain drain has never really stopped out of India, but may have reduced, as the ‘India shining’ joint was handed around and people took an exhilarating smoke of this piece of self-deception. For a while, the availability of all manner of yummy goods – cars, vacations, gadgets, high-paying jobs, and that whole bag of goodies – made people believe that there was much that was great and good about remaining in India. But now there is a fresh round of brain drain that has begun, and this time it is at a younger age. Those who can afford it are simply sending off their kids, all-expenses-paid, to undergrad studies in the US, and hoping that they will simply not come back. As one parent put it cynically, when he opened the papers up to yet another picture of idols immersed in filth and reports of decibel levels crossing all bounds: “better to shell out hefty tuition money and ensure them a good quality of life there, than spend that money here on bribes and overpriced education, and watch them having to deal with all this stuff.” Gouri Dange