The Durga Puja Festival and the Festival of Light, Diwali has
just completed. This was almost a festival month across India with
celebrations, mainly at night with full lights and fire crackers. During this
month long holiday many people decided to Celebrate the Festival of Light at
Tiger Hill early morning. The rising sun, the lights on the mighty
Khangchendzonga and a few other snow capped peaks, the music of the birds
waking to the sun is no less a festival of lights and practically lights up the
inside, a rare opportunity to get the real blessings. Any nature’s festival
makes everyone happy, without making any difference between rich and the poor,
the powerful and the downtrodden, the believer or atheist, the fair and the
dark, the good and the bad. We did have many such events and traditions before,
which make everyone happy, and now the time has arrived when we should try and
patronize such rare activities.
Only last week while on the speeding train through many
unknown village landscapes, I woke up early morning, and peeping through the
window, to my amazement I noticed there were people squatting beside the
railway line for the morning clearance, which certainly is not very uncommon,
but some of them speaking on their mobile during their action. Sometimes it is
hard to understand, what is more important, the mobile phone or the sanitary
toilets.
Similarly, many urban priorities have reached the villages.
We often see that development means urbanization; and urbanization means display
of resource wastage. This has even entered our villages. We have been removed
from several of our village traditions. Specially waking and sleeping by the
natural light, all of it mostly using more of our never ending resources like
solar, wind etc, instead of electricity for lights and air-conditions at almost
all working and living spaces. Our city malls are more active at night and most
of them are lit up all night for reasons unknown.
Experience their ancestors, the village mall, called HAAT, a
weekly market which started on the basis of barter system between several
clusters of villages and exists even today with no carbon footprints or guilt
to follow. In most places it starts early in the morning, at some places a
little late, but finishes by day light. Some bamboo with simple roofing
plastics are used by the little bigger traders, the small village producer
simply put their products on the ground for sale.
From Bamboo, cows, bullocks to fish, vegetables and tea, all
that we need to lead a village life is available here. These are mostly sold by
the producers themselves and they get their money directly through a process
which may be termed as Fair-trade. Again these producers with the money they
have generated from sales, they buy their essentials. Everything is cleared
before dark and next day morning there is no trace of this big market held.
This is a place for communal harmony, a people to people meeting place to know
and understand each other directly.
Many of us get lost in the Malls, but can find ourselves in
these HAATs, mostly called Bazaar (which is probably of Persian origin), and
want this tradition to live. Hence, this initiative has been taken to put
together information of Haats or Bazaars near tourist destination to enable the
tourists to visit them. This will give them a better understanding of the local
people, their lifestyle and their joys in the small things. These Haats and
Bazaars are ‘hubs for happiness’ for all, the buyer, seller and the visitor.
Please email the information about your nearest Haat or Bazaar to atishdipankara@gmail.com and the
same will be updated in this blog.
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