Ushering New Year

It is Bengali new year day, but as I travel to another place, some four hours from home, I see no sign of celebration on the way, except some small shops were beginning to decorate the entrance with flowers; the traffic on the road was relatively less, but what about the celebrations? A good many people in the state seem to be quite oblivious of the fact that they were beginning yet another calendar year, and given the fact that in rural Bengal it is the Bengali calendar which is more in vogue than the English calendar, but we have long embraced the English New Year day than the regional one, and that says a lot about the change in attitude of the people towards long cherished traditions and cultural moors.

As New Year ushers in new hope and new aspirations; unfortunately promises and great plans are still stringed to the English New Year day; and they disappear into thin air a few days after the New Year. I have not heard about anyone taking New Year promises on a Bengali calendar year. For the general public, the regional calendar is of much less significant than the accepted English calendar. We are on the verge of giving a decent burial to the calendar which was shaping our socio-cultural living for centuries, and are prepared to replace it with the foreign and even alien system of calendar which may place us on an equal footing with the rest of the world.>/p>

Exchange of greetings on this day is not common either; as I travelled and met friends and familiar people, only one remembered to wish me Happy New Year, and that person is not a Bengali (in the true sense of the word, but a true Bengali at heart); I too did not dare to wish friends and associates, lest they should think I am old fashioned. The world is fast changing, and whatever that is local, close to the soil, is being relegated to the dusty store rooms, and whatever is foreign (bilati, and even our vegetables and fruits now have a prefix of ‘bilati’ – even our long time favorites, brinjal and tomatoes have fair skins) is glorified, treasured at the core of our homes and hearts.

The one word that goes round in our newspapers and during election campaigns these days is the ‘change’; it seems that the ‘change’ is inevitable in the political, cultural and social levels, and when the whole state is on the move towards change, no one can resist its powerful currents. There is a mad rush to welcome change, as if we had not experienced it all these years; we think only in terms of political powers, but we had been confronting change, for better or worse, almost everyday, and many of them had done good too. Those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it, so says an old Indian proverb, and therefore we need to keep our records intact, the path we have come along.

New Year ushers in new hope and enthusiasm; every business person or a shopkeeper who opens a new “haal khatha” (account book) hopes that the New Year will come with “subha laabh” (manifold rewards). We all of us plead with the gods and goddesses on this day to make each day, a day of plenty, because it is only in plenty could we find our joy and happiness. But this is a paradox that we have landed in; we may find true joy and happiness only in scarcity and not in plenty. A person who has just a few hands full of rice enjoys it with great relish than the one who has too much to eat and throw off. The person who has just a few rupees spends it with great care than the person who has too much to spare. Therefore my New Year wish is that all may have just enough for them to be happy and contended, and share the surplus with those in dire need of them, and that is when each day of the year can be a New Year’s day.