More to Divali than the market

From the festival of lights anchored in custom and tradition, Divali has now become an excuse for netting buyers and an unabashed celebration of conspicuous consumption, writes
Akanksha Bhalla

BILLBOARDS and hoardings scream out enticing Divali offers. Newspapers carry special supplements splashing the festival bonanza of an exclusive range of products, awaiting consumers around Divali.

If this Divali is to be lit with attainments of money, then many a home shall remain in dark.

The festival having transformed into a huge consumer mela, it is out of the reach of many Indians. The middle class is riding high on the crest of a new-found MNC culture. No wonder, mass consumerism marks the celebrations which were earlier, perhaps, our last link to a rich but forgotten tradition. Abhinav Sidhu, manager, Ranbaxy, is all geared up to loosen his purse strings on Divali. He explains, "Shops are offering heavy discounts and money is what matters most to the city populace. If they are given a chance to save even Rs 500 or Rs 1,000, it’s a deal well-struck."

The global corporate giants, of course, have never missed an opportunity to play on the proclivities of the middle class. So they deck up plush shopping malls with and make irresistible offers: shopping, eating, celebrating being the bottomline. Footfalls double. Tanishq launches its premium line of jewellery and boosts 40 per cent of its annual sales during Divali.

Dinesh Kapoor, director, Kapsons Group, organises a Bid-and-Win festival across its stores in Punjab. The chance of winning the luxury car, kept on a pedestal outside the store, lures customers. Products are pushed aggressively. Sales peak.

And while we thought we celebrated Divali, the neo-liberalists realised their agenda of making us a bigger and bigger consumer.

While economic reforms ushered in opulence for the already rich and investment in foreign stocks boomed, rural credit crashed. "The rich get loans at 6 per cent to buy a Mercedes Benz, but the farmer pays more than twice, perhaps even thrice that rate to buy a tractor," says veteran journalist P. Sainath in his forthcoming book, The Indian Media: Illusion, Delusion and Reality.

The consumer is happy to celebrate his Divali even on instalments as long as he gets his heart’s desire, for instance, the new plasma screen TV.

Says Somesh Sharma, AGM, Santabanta.com, "I bought a 29" colour TV for Divali even though I didn’t require it really." But Somesh was one of the fortunate few to be awakened as he went for his friend’s wedding to a village in UP and came face to face with reality. "Oh, you never see the real India," he exclaims. "The huts are dilapidated.

There’s no electricity. Not even a torch," he says. Now back in his bustling office after the wedding, he fought hard to resist his friend who coaxed him to buy a new 7.1 mega pixel camera because he still had the old 5.1 pixel, he says with a grimace.

As Divali became yet another occasion for cheap display of crass consumerism, the real essence of festivity got grossly negated.

Ayodhya celebrated Divali to welcome back their king Lord Rama and reinstate Ram rajya, an ideal society in common parlance. In Ram rajya, nobody lived in penury. It is supposed to be a society built on principles of co-existence, sharing of wealth and equality. The overbearing consumer within us chose to violate the spirit of the festival and used it, instead, to sharpen the divide between the rich and poor India.

If only we could as much as spare a thought for those who inhabited the ‘poor India’, greater in size and proportion than the tiny urban elite. Our idea of Divali has has rendered them incapable of participating in the celebrations.

One would have, at least, expected the media to raise some questions but we drew a blank. The media talked in laudatory terms and unabashedly jumped on the mega shopping fest bandwagon. ‘Splurge and bring goddess Lakshmi home in style’ was the catch line of a Divali write-up in a leading English daily. ‘Deluxe India’, the cover story of the 2004 Divali special issue of an English weekly, declared Indians had all the reason to cheer. Our prosperity had skyrocketed. We could now boast of 53,000 families who were billionaires. And as if by oversight, it just forgot the bottom 400 million people and the way they live. Or may be they are not even living. They are barely subsisting. And when even survival is a battle, they are driven to take their own lives like the deaths of many farmers that get reported not as a matter of concern but in the routine manner.

We hoped Divali to be that one time we reconnected with those left behind in our mad race for acquisition. We hoped Divali to be that one time we gave material things a go-by and experienced a sense of renewal. Divali symbolised the victory of good over evil. While the spirit of the festival was to be all-encompassing, it increasingly isolated a large chunk of people who can no longer afford this Divali.

The gifts are getting more expensive and wasteful. Corporate gifting being the latest fad in a sham competition to outdo each other. Bribes disguised as gifts are conveniently exchanged. NRIs are the new target group. Indian sites are agog with ads saying ‘Click Here for Divali dhamaka’ that arouse your guilt and elicit homesickness. They transport you to galleries where you can pick gifts like ‘Tribal Iron’, ‘Anglo-Indian sterling silver ware’ and ‘exclusive pieces of contemporary art’ that compensate for the lack of Indianness.

It is not as if our instincts are not sensing something amiss amid the pomp and show. There is a vain attempt to return to basics. The buzz to ‘go traditional’ this Divali is not entirely surprising. So we make a facile bid to do away with synthetics and buy traditional chocolates in handi-shaped bowls made of wrought iron with an earthen Ganesha thrown in to drive home the ethnic effect. The row of clay lamps replaced by electric lights are put back in place. But we don’t have to carry tradition on our sleeve in order to feel traditional. We need to renew our faith and mindset if the festival has to be more than just an ‘event’. We have to include everyone in the celebration of life.

Else it is all grand and gala.

Says Shelly Walia, culture commentator and Fellow at Oxford, "The festival has become an instrument to indulge in a sort of neo-Nazism. It’s made out to be a huge affair — consumerist and globalist in connotation. There is a loss of aesthetics. Folklore and tradition in every culture were meant to have a cleansing effect. What we are witnessing is a corruption of the purity of the festival."

As we continue to lose our moorings and get increasingly culturally uprooted, Divali is to be that time we reassert and reinvigorate our culture.

It’s a time we realise that the gap between them and us has become so wide that it might get crystallised.

The poor man has a right to Divali too. The festival was never meant to discriminate. We alienated him. So this Divali, heed his plea-Lend him some light.

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