Shubho Nabobarsho!
What follows is a rather melancholy post. Therefore, stop right here unless you want to feel a bit low on this special day, like I’m doing. Why, you ask? Yes, that’s it. You’ve hit upon the right word ‘special’. What is special about today, I ask?
I remember my childhood days in a small town when Poila Boisakh would begin with a bath, new clothes and prayers. It was followed by a lunch of sumptuous food, typically Bengali fare, cooked by my Ma. Ma always urged me to do two things on this day – be a good girl to avoid being told off and study for sometime during the day. The belief was that how you start the year impacts the whole year itself.
The evening held another piece of excitement – going to the market holding baba’s hand. Those were the days of mom-and-pop shops where personal relationships were built over the years. The shopkeeper kaku exuded warmth and on Poila Boisakh the attraction was a box of sweets and a Bengali calendar. We would get invitations to visit on this day by different shops and a couple visits meant a couple of sweet boxes and my day was made!
Cut to today’s life of working for MNCs where local festivals are hardly valued. Piles of work at office, meetings and the usual signs of a busy work-aday. However, whether you get a day off or not, rest assured you have to give one to your domestic help. Food is the average everyday food unless you are able to take time off from work and prepare a hearty meal for your family. Gone are the mom-and-pop shops in this age of larger-than-life, commercialized malls.
All this makes up just another busy day. The Bengali new year has been reduced to just a set of new clothes to mark the occasion. So what is special about this Poila Boisakh and how are we supposed to teach our kids the value of our festivals?
What follows is a rather melancholy post. Therefore, stop right here unless you want to feel a bit low on this special day, like I’m doing. Why, you ask? Yes, that’s it. You’ve hit upon the right word ‘special’. What is special about today, I ask?
I remember my childhood days in a small town when Poila Boisakh would begin with a bath, new clothes and prayers. It was followed by a lunch of sumptuous food, typically Bengali fare, cooked by my Ma. Ma always urged me to do two things on this day – be a good girl to avoid being told off and study for sometime during the day. The belief was that how you start the year impacts the whole year itself.
The evening held another piece of excitement – going to the market holding baba’s hand. Those were the days of mom-and-pop shops where personal relationships were built over the years. The shopkeeper kaku exuded warmth and on Poila Boisakh the attraction was a box of sweets and a Bengali calendar. We would get invitations to visit on this day by different shops and a couple visits meant a couple of sweet boxes and my day was made!
Cut to today’s life of working for MNCs where local festivals are hardly valued. Piles of work at office, meetings and the usual signs of a busy work-aday. However, whether you get a day off or not, rest assured you have to give one to your domestic help. Food is the average everyday food unless you are able to take time off from work and prepare a hearty meal for your family. Gone are the mom-and-pop shops in this age of larger-than-life, commercialized malls.
All this makes up just another busy day. The Bengali new year has been reduced to just a set of new clothes to mark the occasion. So what is special about this Poila Boisakh and how are we supposed to teach our kids the value of our festivals?
