Mixed bag

The box of laddoo lying casually on your dining table,tells a story. So do the fairy lights that twinkle cheerfully on nippy,autumn evenings.

The box of laddoo lying casually on your dining table,tells a story. So do the fairy lights that twinkle cheerfully on nippy,autumn evenings. Its a tale that tells us about Kolkatas cosmopolitan spirit,laced as it is with gradual decline of traditions. The ladoos have fought their way to your table,bringing down the hegemony of parochial Bengali sweetmeats,and the fairy lights are beacons of change. As Soumyak Kanti De Biswas of Tin Can fondly recallsFor me Kali Puja was laden with tradition. We belong to a bonedi family in north Kolkata and tradition was place above everything else for us. But today we only celebrate Diwali which is more about festivities than rituals, says De Biswas.

Kali Puja and Diwali may be enmeshed in the urban Bengali mind but they are not necessarily the same. We celebrate a Bollywood version of Diwali. We light diyas,burn crackers and exchange boxes of assorted chocolates. Kali Puja is not about all this. Its the invocation of goddess Kali who symbolizes power, claims Arundhati Ghosh,a public relations officer with a reputed city hotel.

If one were stickler for tradition,and were to celebrate Kali Puja instead of Diwali,there wouldnt be much fireworks and there would be very little time for sharing light-hearted banter with friends. We celebrate Kali Puju in our ancestral home in Burdwan and its serious business. We hardly have time to burst crackers as much of our time is taken up with the puja rituals. The process of animal sacrifice itself has such a primordial feel about it. I feel like Im in a different world when I participate in this puja, says Saikat Bose,who works for a multinational company in Gurgaon.

Sambuddha Chaudhuri,an intern with the Midnapore Medical College agrees. Kali Puja is not a light-hearted festival at all. It is all about ferocity of the goddess. Diwali on the other hand,celebrates triumph of good over evil and has metamorphosed into a more secular festival for urban Indians. Its about people coming together and sharing. The whole feel of the festival is quite in contradiction to Kali Puja, says Chaudhuri.

So is the urban Bengali right to embrace this more cosmopolitan avatar of the festival?

There can be nothing right or wrong about celebrations. Whats wrong with celebrating Diwali in a more cosmopolitan manner? Its a very pleasant marriage of tradition and culture. As far as Kali Puja is concerned,one has to understand that its primarily a religious festival and stands for a lot of other things. But at the end of the day they are all means to achieve the same end- happiness and peace, sums up De Biswas.

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