(In)voluntarily becoming a festival drawing
By: Shivendra Lal
Tags: Holidays 2021, Festivals, Life Lessons, Meaning, Life

It’s that time of the year, again. The time when holidays begin looming over right up to the point of eve. In India, the time starts few weeks earlier with the Diwali festival. The looming period has gradually transformed into the celebratory time. Markets are lit up, swarmed with people pouring over their wallets, ridiculous sale offers, steaming hot food, and all the hustle bustle that goes along. Brands, business owners rush to make that incremental sale, and consumers rush to grab every bit of things at a discount even though they don’t need them.

All that has ensued in the past two years, one would assume that the festive spirit may have dampened, but it doesn’t look like so. For me, personally, this part of the year has always been confusing. Rather, any festive time of the year is. Like everyone else, I too have been conditioned to look forward to these days and prepare to be happy. But I barely feel any happiness around these days, in general.

As a child I used to be excited about festivals and holidays. That was primarily because of the following reasons:

New clothes

Sweet treats

Rich food

No school

As I grew older, I could not help observe certain patterns emerging around the concept of holidays. Some of these patterns existed only in our household, and some in the extended family, locality, city, state, country, and beyond.

The build up to festivities…

Every festive or holiday season is preceded by days, weeks, and at times, months of build up. At home, it would take the shape of discussions around what to wear, eat, gift, or buy. House cleaning is also a significant part of the conversation.

…results in progressive ramping up of jobs and responsibilities …

The build up is basically a ruse to push whims and fancies on to as many people as possible. At home, the primary decision maker (quite often the lady of the house) would prepare a fungible list of to-dos. The idea is to keep the list as open-ended as possible. This is the time when she can persuade everyone to help in household chores in the name of having a ‘good family time together’. (Notice the careful choice of the words in quotes)

At school, the teachers need to keep the conditioning alive in the form of drawings, charts, plays, choruses, and allied activities. The objective is to push the students to come up with a large quantum of creative stuff that the school display board can’t accommodate. It serves the higher purpose of teachers showcasing to their peers and superiors how much ‘their’ students have learnt. And earn extra brownie points when parents are elated to see their child’s work pinned in a corner of the display board, even if it is in a damp corner of the room or corridor.

At work, the manager will start the conversation of ‘planned holidays’ early on. What it implies is that s/he wants to gauge which team member is distracted by the idea of unwinding at the upcoming festivities. As a result, that person is more likely to do anything prior to the holidays to ‘truly earn’ the right to relax. The manager would then craft an over ambitious list of tasks in the hope of overachieving the monthly or quarterly, and even better, the annual target.

The ‘priests’ in the places of worship, government, and media networks give sermons on how the upcoming festive season is likely to bring upon us God’s blessings. In plain terms, places of worship get more footfalls and donations. Government gets to either announce new projects (which will be funded by taxpayers’ hard earned money) or enforce restrictions to avoid any incidents by over zealous people (which they hope would happen that would justify the incremental spend on law enforcement), or both. Media networks get the ad revenue at premium rates, and air the much hoped for incidents for better ratings (more ad revenue).

…that increases stress and fatigue exponentially, …

Everyone, and I mean everyone, is exhausted at a sub-conscious level. For the lady of the house, that the ever-expanding to-do list and extensive cleaning drive means multiplication of activities. Teachers must come up with a novel task for the students which no other teacher has come up before. The student is burdened with the pressure to come up with an award-winning creative to outdo the classmates. This in turn adds to the pressure for the parents (more often than not, the mother). Because a child can come up with novel ideas but it’s the parents who are responsible for delivering it.

The manager is burdened with ‘Alpha Centauri’ high expectations of the management. (In this age of Marvel Universe, reaching for the sky high mounts to nothing. Sky is a mere portal for bad aliens to invade our planet.) So, s/he must come up with an idea akin to building a rocket that moves at the speed of light, requires no fuel, and can carry heirlooms of the entire human population so that the entire humanity can skyrocket to Alpha Centauri in one go.

Usually, it means creating two to three parallel sub-projects spawned from an ongoing project and/or data collection and analysis.

The ‘priests’ want you to enjoy the festival as long as you uphold their authority, add to the crowd in public places, defy the sermons and create ruckus, keep the media channels on the whole day, and skinny dip into social media platforms.

… increases reliance on compensatory behaviours, …

With so much happening around, the head is bound to spin. Add to that, the mounting pressure of fulfilling unsought responsibility of others’ agenda. You get into survival mode — flight or fight are the only choices. Choosing one is impractical.

So, most of us choose the invisible option — acquiescence. Unwillingly accept the responsibility and work half-heartedly towards to fulfilling it as much as you can to do things right. Even if it ends up in trying to salvage the situation.

Consequently, mediocrity becomes the acceptable benchmark. But, your conscience gets triggered and starts prodding you to do the right thing. Now, this conflicts with the mediocre choice of doing things right. All the stress of meeting expectations was hard to deal with anyway, and now your inner self is gnawing into you. You get into self-preservation by spending money on things that you never wanted in the first place (forget about needing them), and eating and drinking things that you should have avoided completely.

…and deepens guilt and shame.

On the day of the festival, you must wake up with near-maniacal excitement even though you barely managed to drag yourself out of the bed. It’s all good. Life’s good. That is the only energy you are allowed to exude while deep down within you seek solitude and peace. Now that you have managed to survive to arrive at the beach of Normandy, you must strive for victory. Victory of meeting others’ expectations, identifying tiny parts of those expectations as your own, and feeling good about the fact that you fulfilled all that (to whatever extent)! In 2021(2), it also means partaking in the social media race of sharing the most unseen images downloaded from Google Images. If you can string all these experiences with beautiful things to say which contain acceptable terms like ‘family time’, ‘teaming’, ‘socialising’, and ‘togetherness’, you are golden. You will be made whole, and enough.

That conscience of yours, that inner child that was standing right next to you at every step of this ordeal and pulling on your little finger, is now standing on a stool, staring straight into your eyes. A gaze that you want to avoid at all costs (and do most of the times), but can’t. Simply because you know that you signed up for all of this, but didn’t bother to ask why. You now face uncomfortable questions that are too hard to answer. You know the answers, too. But, it’s better to take the flight mode than facing the truth. So now you feel guilty about ignoring your inner self, and ashamed of making choices that you never wanted to. Well, most of them.

You, just like everybody else, wanted to have a nice holiday and enjoy the festivities. Some peace and quiet from the cacophony of life. To spend time with the only person you know the best and who knows you the best, yourself. But, at what cost and to what cause?

In ancient times, our ancestors came up with the idea of festivals to celebrate the things that nature and the Universe have to offer us. The very things that add up to give us the only thing that we have — this life, right now. Contrary to the foundational empirical data that science hails, and the diktat laced in stories that ‘great’ religious minds relay, our ancestors were smart enough to realise that if you made through the day to the night, and woke up the next day, the job was well done. Completing this process every day was enough. Worthy of being celebrated and expressing gratitude to that Unknown Force that allowed us to persist. Believe it or not, it still is.

Festivals were conceived to take a pause, recognise the presence of life in you, and be grateful. Holidays are the outcome of social engineering to make you slog so that the select few can truly celebrate life, while others profit, at your expense.

I realised this ‘truth’ about festivals and holidays many years ago. Still, I continue to partake in all these activities, (in)voluntarily. I still choose to be that festival drawing on the display board, even if it dampens my spirit. I find my pieces of expectations become true in the smiles of those who bother to look at me. This toxic positivity is attractive, because it gives you the false sense of achievement. Achievement of being able to ‘fit in’.

And the heart, like a fool, finds comfort in the accompanying guilt and shame no matter how toxic it is for the soul. A toxic connection, after all, is still a connection.