The thieves had studied our vulnerability, scaled the wall, broken the lock of the brick-tin hut, disengaged the two water-pumps with their pipe wrenches, probably sold them at one-fourth of their real value and with smirking faces and smeared consciences tried to enjoy Dashain. Perhaps, they bought goats for their families. Perhaps, they gambled away their loot. So, I wonder at every Dashain what next our office will lose. Dashain breeds criminals like no other festival.
Legend has it that Dashain celebrates the victory of good over evil. Positively, Dashain brings scattered families together and gives office workers 15 days of card-playing relaxation. Otherwise, present-day Dashain reminds us more of the victory of evil over good.
Positively, Dashain brings scattered families together and gives office workers 15 days of card-playing relaxation. Otherwise, present-day Dashain reminds us more of the victory of evil over good.
Two months before Dashain starts, urchins have begun to assemble gambling boards and dice. The whole day, the street corner offers free lessons in getting something for nothing, which gambling is. Then and during Dashain, actual money exchanges hands. Gambling corrupts minds, makes some life-long addicts, others criminals and perpetual wife-beaters. In his novel, Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens has a character Fagin who instructs youths how to become pick-pockets. In our context, Dashain teaches people to turn into gamblers. Folklore encourages it. Religious scriptures have examples of “great” people gambling away their wives. Even the Rana autocracy, suspicious of any gathering so as to impose daily curfews at night, allowed people to assemble for gambling during Dashain.
Dashain has also become a crash course in materialism. Months before Dashain starts, shops have begun to advertise their goods that they regard as most essential for the festival. On a larger scale, the same happens in the West for Christmas. As a PhD student in Oxford, I noticed that shops began to offer Christmas “discounts” right from August. Shopping got more intense as December approached but five months earlier businesses had already hooked people into buying things they didn’t need.
In our country, a month before Dashain we had the cholera epidemic in Jajarkot. Just before Phulpati, TV showed pictures of some Bajura-dwellers fighting for a bag of rice, others returning home empty from the Kolti depot. Blissfully, from Dashain’s eighth day (Astami), newspapers ceased to exist. So, we don’t know if the people in Bajura got their rice or had to survive on roots. While Kathmanduites get diarrhea for having eaten too much stale mutton, Bajura-dwellers suffer stomach cramps because their bellies have nothing to digest. The “plenty” of the capital contrasts with the “empty” of our remote regions—another example of evil overcoming good.
Dashain has turned into a big dasha (misfortune) because of our antiquated means of transport. How many governments have vowed to do away with the syndicate system? Yet, syndicates thrive, prevent a bus from leaving until it is brimming full of people and make our road-travel probably the most unsafe in the world. Come Dashain and bus owners buy more stools for unfortunate passengers forced to perch in the aisle, sometimes with a few bleating goats. Then, youths reign on top (luggage rack) of the already overcrowded vehicles. If passengers complain, the conductor replies, “You’re lucky to be traveling at all!” Sure, few people can buy air tickets in black.
This Dashain, one village lad known to me traveled on top of a bus, not within. He fell down, broke his arm and landed up in B & B Hospital instead of his father’s home.
Throughout the country, his story repeats as radios blare out news of countless accidents. Worse, many reach the funeral pyre, not their families.
For me, this Dashain became a dasha mainly because of loudspeakers that broadcasted “piety” to my village. From a clumsy tent across the Bagmati river boomed Hindi songs that irritated me from early morning till late at night. My ambition to read a few books went haywire.
A strange phenomenon has gripped our country. Religious fanatics will build a temple on any plot of common land. Instead of a school, a clinic, or a much-needed park, the village will have its umpteenth “holy” site. (We had no Dashain swing in our village because a temple complex now stands on the only empty meadow we possessed.) To earn merit, sponsors will buy a public address system so that the entire village can know the priest is having his “quiet” devotion. His children will help with Hindi devotionals or Bollywood hits. At night, when people want to go to bed, urchins grabbing the microphone have a rock contest and belch out any lewd song. Never mind that students and the sick may prefer silence.
This Dashain, I realized afresh that culturally we’d become an Indian colony even before 1816 Sugauli Treaty that made us half-sovereign. Didn’t the South Indian Sankaracharya come to our country around 788 AD, destroy Buddhist monuments and literature, demand that South Indian priests rule over Pashupati and force his will on the incumbent king? Didn’t Prithvi Narayan Shah go to Benares for pilgrimage as well as amassing arms for his battles? Didn’t Rana Bahadur Shah and Rajendra Bikram use the same Indian holy city to “retire” and then “regain” their lost power. Haven’t many of our political leaders gotten academic degrees from there or Patna? Don’t some of our pundits and politicians blindly follow the Bharatiya Janata Party based on the Indian Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) that proudly imitates Hitler’s Nazism and Benito Mussolini’s fascism (as Arundhati Roy’s confirms in her book Listening to Grasshoppers)?
In vain, Maoists protest against South Indian priests officiating at Pashupati when they ignore the imported Bihari loudspeaker culture at the same site. Our ministers go to inaugurate such functions and forget that residents nearby will have to put up with noise pollution for the next week. Whenever anti-Delhi nationalism erupts next, our super patriots should meditate on the cultural Indian colony we really are. After all, Dashain too bases itself on Indian mythology.
Reminding us of the dilemma, a Nepali singer croons over the radio, “Is it Dashain or dasha that consumes my head?” Surely, the latter.
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