Lindsay Pereira: Whose festival is it anyway?

Every year, immersions pollute water bodies and ghats in and around the city, adversely affecting the environment too. Pic/PTI

There's a small corner of the locality I live in that has been marked as the designated spot for a couple of large BMC garbage bins. It's tiled in white, presumably because white sets off the colour of garbage so much better, but the bins themselves have been moved 20 metres away to a spot where they are a hair's breadth away from being able to obstruct traffic.

The tiled area is now used as a spot where some of the local youth gather every night to discuss the weighty issues that possibly prevent them from seeking gainful employment.
The area around the bins is always overflowing with garbage but tidied up for an hour or so during major festivals because, as our antiquated government-sponsored textbooks have always taught us, cleanliness is next to godliness. The Swachh Bharat Campaign - to which you and I contribute whether we like it or not - has yet to reach my locality. Cleanliness is taken as seriously as Rahul Gandhi's attempt to be Prime Minister.

Every year, immersions pollute water bodies and ghats in and around the city, adversely affecting the environment too. Pic/PTI

And so, days before a major festival, the street is cursorily cleaned up, holes are dug into the already unstable paver blocks so that poles for electric lights can be propped up, and the mandatory speaker systems come out to regale everyone within a kilometre with the latest Bollywood remixes. This year's special number was Kala Chashma - a song about sunglasses that, I assumed, held some spiritual importance I was obviously unaware of. I heard it on numerous occasions for over a week, interspersed with the odd bhajan or two.

A few political posters cropped up during the last festival too, featuring men with bad hairdos and a worrying amount of jewellery. I had never seen them before in my life, but they were supposedly the politicians in charge of my locality. Posters with their faces were presumably their way of reminding us all that we could focus on our respective gods and goddesses, but ought to spare a thought to those who ran the show here too.

The music petered out at 11 pm on some days, and carried on past 1 am on others. It was illegal, obviously, but much of what passes for festivity in our city has always been illegal - temporary structures on busy streets, stalls hawking fireworks outside railway stations, massive sound systems near residential colonies, eardrum-shattering music outside hospitals, large posters at traffic signals.

Calling the police wouldn't help. I knew because I had tried before, as had my neighbours, to try and get some people in our locality to recognise the law. We had failed and had received no help from those paid to help uphold the law either. It saddens me that, unlike my childhood in Bombay, few people I know look forward to festivals these days. Senior citizens, minors and pets don't, and working adults dread their tiring commutes home more than usual. Back then, our festivals were about purity and spiritualism, not political patronage, pollution and DJs on trucks.

We are failing to see how what once made our city so special is dying. We are selling its soul for political patronage and Facebook likes, ravaging our seas, destroying our streets and losing our sanity in the process. I have tried, and failed, to understand what so many of my countrymen get by dancing to item numbers in the streets in order to put on a display of devotion. Is it a show of strength, the one-upmanship that comes so naturally to us in our desperate need to tell the world that our languages, our music, our cinema and our gods are better than everyone else's?

I looked out this morning, a few hours after last night's prolonged festivities came to a close. There were the remnants of firecrackers on the street, and a fine patina of coloured powder on a few cars and gates. Some of this powder had mixed with stagnant rainwater after the last shower and turned parts of the street a garish purple.

There were dozens of filthy plastic plates, some still half-filled with snacks, strewn around the garbage bins. The bins themselves had been moved away from their designated spot again. It seemed as if there was no point in trying to be civil, now that our gods had been conned into believing we cared about our surroundings and our fellow human beings, if only for a few days. Now that the gods had been appeased, it seemed we were free to become obnoxious again.

When he isn't ranting about all things Mumbai, Lindsay Pereira can be almost sweet. He tweets @lindsaypereira Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com