I am not an aethist by choice but more out of chance. The problem with being or not being an aethist is that there is no middle path like lets say no one can proclaim that he is moderately aethist and moderately not. I was branded an aethist because of the way in which I portrayed my god. As you would have noticed that people would have said that the way I spelt god is not the right way to spell it. It should have been spelt as God with a capital G to portray the divine power. Now I have problems with this kind of rules that man has created. Why cant my god be spelt with a small g rather than a capital G? I do beleive in the divine power but I am not quite accustomed to the stringent rules that have been put in place as qualifiers for worshipping my god. Things like fasting before a puja or for that matter not touching anything related to the puja without taking a bath first or for that matter the fact that you need a priest to connect to the god does not really make any sense to me.
So I connect to my own god, the one who does not complain if I spell his name with a lower case 'g'. One who does not care if I take a bath or not before going for an appointment with him and he is not one of the sadist type who loves to keep me hungry by fasting. So pujas for me have always been an entertainment of sorts. Be it Durga Puja or Kali puja or Saraswati Puja or for that matter any of the 66 crore gods that we worship, the main essence of a puja for me is to enjoy it to the fullest by unwinding with friends, meeting up new people, having fun and enjoying the spirit of the city of Kolkata at its full glory. After all I really do not need a special day to connect to god, he is there somewhere inside me and I can take an appointment any time I want.
So it was that time of the year again when I was brooding over the fact that I was not in Kolkata to enjoy the Saraswati Puja. Though I havent been in Kolkata for over six years now missing one festival after another yet I feel nostalgic and homesick at these points of time. The earliest memory of Saraswati Puja that I have are those at my Dida's (maternal grandmother's) place. The night before me and my then unmarried aunts used to cut paper in various shapes and decorate the place of worship with various designs. The adhesive that we used to paste the papers was made out of maida (flour). There was this typical fashion in which it stuck to the hand and hardened up over there. After the place got beautified the biggest challenge was to stripe away the adhesives that had hardened on the hands. It was an awesome experience doing that kind of silly things.
As my aunts got married the spot of action shifted to my place and the entire episode became quite interesting. The way ma and me did all the purchasing for the occassion. The way the appointment was fixed up with the preist to ensure that he actually arrived at our place. The way me and my sister were woken up so very early in the morning to take a bath and they way baba (dad) smeared turmeric on our bodies more as a custom than anything. The cold water that splashed the body in that January cold (I had not experienced the cold of Delhi till then and hence cold water in an early January morning felt horrible even if the location was Kolkata). Another interesting memory associated with it is the way baba got tensed up as soon as the designated hour of the arrival of purohit passed by. In these situations his words sounded like the purohit might have been kidnapped on his way, that he might have forgotten about the obligation that he had in our house. And finally after a lot of running around the puja would have been completed to make way for the prasad which usally consisted of the khichuri, labra, chatni and payesh. As I write this my mouth has started watering thinking about it.
Now as one grows up in a place like Kolkata the para (neigbourhood) concept dawns on him/her. One graduates to a club or a rock (a typical Kolkata slang for a place to sit and waste away time doing nothing but gossiping the male way) based on the company his para has to be provide. We 4 or 5 neighbourhood guys of our age group came together to form a club called the evergreen club christened as evergreen by some DevAnand fan. The club hosted its first Saraswati Puja somewhere in 1995 with a platry budget of close to 1500 rupees collecting the platry sum of rupees 10 or 20 that the neighbourhood folks chose to offer. It was quite a task to manage the finances and meet up the costs and balance the balance sheet at the end of the event. Anything in excess went to our hungry tummies in the form of an egg roll or a chicken chow. We envisioned ourselves as young CEOs and CFOs in the making.
As the years went by the budget increased, sometimes drastically over the last year making it all the more difficult to justify the increase in the contribution (chanda) that we sought from the people in the neighbourhood. Moreover Saraswati puja taught me how to multitask. Managing the club puja and the puja at home was quite a hectic affair after all. My ma took full liberty of the situation to yell at me whenever I forgot to bring something which she had asked for or came home late but I survived and thrived on multitasking. The preperation for the pujas started months before the actual thing and it commenced with all sorts of meetings, a whole lot of delegation, a plethora of budgeting and a whole lot of timelines to be met. It meant doing a whole lot of MBA stuffs without being an MBA. So we would be off to Kumartuli on one weekend to order for an idol. The next few sundays would be spent collecting the chanda and listening to abuses of people about how it was not justified to ask for more than Rs. 10 becuase it was merely a Saraswati puja. I still have happy memories of the night before the puja every year, the day we never could sleep because of the immense amount of work that would always be left. The way a guy called Bublu in the group had thought of testing the mikes and blowed it up by playing "Ke Sara Sara" at around 2 in the night waking up people all around the colony and got them shouting obscenities at us. The fight we had with the other clubs in the vicinity and the way they came to beat us up one night. The booze session that we had after the puja and the way I had been awake for more than 24 hours at a stretch which was quite a record before the MBA days set in. The way Manka had us all laughing with his jokes and how we had both started laughing only to be kicked by others to make us stop. The packets of Chilly Chicken and Chowmein that Kota Kaku had provided to all of us in the club for putting up his catering business banner at the puja. And finally I remember a girl who had come like a princess in one such puja to leave an impact on my then baccha sa heart. The few moments of togetherness where we discussed weired stuffs from maths to songs was a thing I would cherish for ever.
Today as I pen down this bit of thoughts sitting in a plush Bangalore office, the thoughts of those happy moments of my childhood and adoloscent days comes back to me. Off course a lot has changed since then. From a paltry budget of Rs.1500 the puja has crossed budgets of Rs. 3 lakhs this year as last heard. Apart from the puja, regular functions are now the new kind of attraction to draw the crowd to our puja. Last year it was a Bengali band called Lakkhichara. This time it is the famous bengali band called Chandrabindu which is going to perform today. The footage of the puja and the functions are shown on the various bengali news channels thanks to Manka who has left cracking stupid jokes and is now a news reader for a famous bengali news channel. The princess who is now committed to some guy and is now a chef in a 5 star hotel in Chennai. And finally I miss home and everybit of it. The puja, the prasad, the khichdi and every small and big thing. Ma's food, baba's tensed expression when the priest came late, my sister who never wanted to get up that early in the morning and kept sleeping, I miss every bit of all this and finally think is everything that I have right now worth it? The only place I could get a glimpse of an idol of Saraswati yesterday was the TV of the gymnasium of my workplace!!
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