Nietzsche at the Pandal

I literally pay a certain amount of money monthly for a domain called aashisha.com so naturally it is expected that I would post there instead of this forgotten corner of the internet where the older me existed once upon a time. But maybe that is the writer’s dichotomy. You want to be read but you don’t want to be discovered. Or maybe I feel that this piece belongs to an older me. Anyway, the pseudoanonymity The Mind Bin affords me is priceless. So, here goes…

“Aunjoli kokhon?” 

I am of the firm belief that people and things have a general resistance to change. Hence, bong basics remain nearly constant, be it in Kolkata, Delhi or Toronto. Men and women bedecked in resplendent peacocky colors, in a desperate bid to outdo the other. A stray couple here and a raggedy bunch of guys and girls taking selfies from the oddest and weirdest angles possible and suddenly, I was back in my childhood again. 

Durga Pujo has always meant a world of things to me, a fashion parade first and foremost (read a blooper parade) as if the goddesses were assigning blessings with respect to how well-dressed you are and how many jewels you have on (maybe this was what people believed eons ago anyway); second, pujo had been our annual license to chill and hang out 

 

for a week without any parental supervision when we were in school. 

I had come to this pujo celebration at Mississauga with my college buddy, his wife and three-year-old daughter who had started crying because she found all the noise hugely distracting. Noise? I found the dhaak sounds practically background music, barely registered with me. 

“Aunjoli hoye gaichhe?” 

My friend asked us again, making me miss my pujo convenor mom in India who would give us updates on Whatsapp so we would reach right on time for aunjolis, joggo, ulludhwani contests, and what have you. This time, of course, I didn’t have the pleasure of such timely updates. As is, I had taken the GO train from downtown Toronto on a Saturday morning (pujos are very conveniently celebrated over the weekends in this part of the world) on an empty stomach so we didn’t even stop for a cup of steaming Tim Horton’s double-double on the way. 

“Aunjoli hoye gaichhe ki?” 

When the question came from him for the third time, I realized that he was among that group of bongs who have been raised with a time ticker in place. Which is probably because the other half of us have been raised with a zero-f***s-given attitude. So, when one set drops the ball, the other has to pick it up. If you are a bong, you will know that the first half - the time ticker tribe have an innate Schopenhauerish pessimism which makes them believe that misfortune is the rule rather than the exception. So, we come to Ma knowing that something has gone wrong unless proven otherwise, that we must have missed the aunjoli, and hence, ask numberless questions reinforcing that idea. The other half though, more Nietzschean in spirit, self-inventors rejecting conventions, are built on the belief that they have “their own connection with Ma.” This half does not care much if they miss their aunjolis or even the entire pujo. They would blissfully drop in at 11 pm in the night on an ashtami/navami with their characteristic swagger that basically stems from the conviction that divinity is flexible if your faith is sincere. Their connection can only be observed by mere mortals for about five minutes and that too if they peer too closely. Those five minutes of eye contact can mean everything though; probably what the pertinacious artisans worked at for days and weeks and months turning their clay handiwork into believable parables of hope for a community. Nevertheless, the questions do not stop. 

“Aunjoli kothay?” 

This is a far deeper question than it seems. Kothay. Where. Where do we find what we seek? We are all looking for something unnamed. We are all on a hunt for something we don’t quite know even exists. Maybe that’s why we gather in clusters, across continents, across weather, across years. Looking for that something. Call it a vibe, a memory, a prayer. Or a worship of hope, a flicker of belonging. What Heidegger termed as a dwelling of sorts? Or what us lay people call community. Or even Durkheim’s (collective effervescence) version of light, love and answers? Ma, of course, cannot grant everyone’s wishes or fulfil everyone’s promises. But what she can do is take the artisan’s dream in a moment of gay abandon and turn that enigmatic work of art shaped for weeks in humble clay into a rush of hope for a people. 

So, the answer is probably here. 

The where is right here, wherever you stand. 

Feeling the unignorable pull of something larger than yourself.