So what did you throw out this Bhogi?

Today we choose to see Pongal as a ‘harvest festival’ because of the newly harvested sugar cane and rice and vegetable that are integral to the celebrations. But it was more than that.

Pongal, I’ve always felt, was a remnant of our pantheistic past. The sugarcane and milk, the earthen pot and the firewood stove – the medium, the container and the content - were all drawn from nature and went to nurture us, beings made of earth stuff.  Pongal speaks of a time when man was tuned in to nature and the earth in rich and meaningful ways.

As Carl Sagan says [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4E-_DdX8Ke0] , our ancestors knew the cosmic cycles that rule our lives – the seasons, the motions of the earth and the sun, and the sweep of time-space. 

And Pongal celebrated these. From the pagan celebration of bounty, ripeness, and fertility to the ancestor worshipper’s thankful worshipful offering to souls gone by, to the cosmologist’s recognition of spatial movement and cosmic cycles, Pongal has something for every taste. And truly represents the complexity of the Hindu religion.

A day before Pongal in South India is traditionally celebrated as bhogi – a day when old, broken and wasted things are cast out of our lives by burning. A symbolic understanding that old has to give way for the new, that birth and death go hand in hand, that renewal implies destruction. That an understanding of ‘new’ goes with an understanding of ‘old’. A celebration of life and birth goes with an acceptance of death. That acquiring and getting come after giving up. That new construction builds on the site of destruction. That life at our miniscule individual level only mirrors the cycle at the macro levels – where universes  burst into being and after eons, self-destruct, leaving not a trace. Only to reassemble and appear once again.

I also believe that this ritual act of giving up belongings and possessions that are old and redundant,  is also meant to inculcate a habit and an attitude that will help us forgive others, forgive ourselves, heal hurts, expunge negativity and bad memories, and manage grief and loss.

All rituals are physical acts that are meant to cultivate qualities and attitudes of the mind that make us better, stronger human beings.

The seemingly pagan ritual has deep significance – layers can be read into it.

But as always we manage to reduce a festival to a mere celebration. A mere shell. A clutch of worn out rituals. Bhogi is today a marked by some ritual burning of waste – but with rubber tyres and tubes and plastic being tossed carelessly into the bonfire, Bhogi has become an environmental hazard.  It only shows how far we have travelled from our nature-dependent days, and how the excesses of this deviation can harm a fragile world.

But even this obvious understanding is lost on us. We need a government to legislate on bonfires and artificially-coloured idols.

With the bonfire also out, to us in cities and towns, Bhogi is today marked by a perfunctory cobweb-dusting and changing of curtains. Very few of us take stock of things in our houses and throw away what we do not need.

Perhaps this is because we love piling and accumulating – and maybe have forgotten a good definition of ‘need’. We can no longer discriminate between what we really ‘need’ and what we do not need.  We ‘need’ everything that we have and that we don’t have.  

I sometimes feel we are not ready to celebrate a renewal or a new ‘getting’ if we are not ready for ‘giving up’.  

And if we cannot give up a broken pen, or a patched up footstool, are we ready to forgive hurts and deal with the loss of a dear one?

Maybe that is one of the reasons why incidents of depression, violence, mental sicknesses of different kinds, and aggression have grown in our culture. They are symptoms of an imbalance in ourselves that arise out of an inability to tune in to nature’s frequency. There is so much of a disconnect between the individual and the universe that we no longer are sensitive to its movements and vibrations.

I sometimes think this is not only unnatural, it is also anti-natural. It goes against the principles governing the universe [ the principle of cyclical birth and death, coming into existence and going out of existence] and therefore cannot be good for us.

In cities and towns, we can no longer think of going back to firewood stoves and earthen pots. But need we reduce the significance of Pongal to a colourful kolam made of powdered stone and a mash of rice and jaggery? How can we re-invent the celebration to add meaning to our lives and bring back the joy of community living that we have forgotten along the way? 

Bhogi and Pongal are just examples of a deeper malaise in our community: our lack of will to face the fact that our lives are out of snyc with our religious practices. That we have reduced our religions to a rubbish heap of meaningless rituals. Shorn of its soul or its core symbolic understanding, religion is not only a meaningless shell, but a shell that is hard and sharp and can actually harm and hurt us. 

So what does religion mean to us? Do we need it at all? What part of our beliefs and faith do we need to cast off and what do we need to renew? Can we redefine our ceremonies and celebrations to make them relevant and significant for us today? 

If we don't address these questions soon, it is quite likely that in our lifetime, we will see the core wisdom of Hindu dharma ebbing away from memory. 

Nearly two millennia back, there lived in our sub-continent great kings like Kanishka and Harshavardhana who organized huge religious assemblies where scholars and sages discussed and argued principles and interpretations of religion. There were conscious attempts to organize reflection and thought. Why, then, is this sub-continent not capable of honestly facing itself today, of identifying the weed from the seed, the chaff from the grain and courageously taking steps to restore health and harmony?