One man and a small child dead; another child in the intensive care unit.
That was the net effect of last week’s Diwali celebrations in Nairobi. Diwali is the Hindu festival of light, and is meant to signify humanity’s evolution from darkness to light, from the forests to civilisation. An apt metaphor for where we are in Kenya today.
However, modern-day Diwali, as we all know, has become the festival of loud explosions. While the festival is on, woe betide you if you happen to live close to a Hindu community hall. For several hours, you will wonder if you have stepped into downtown Baghdad during an air raid.
Light, in all cultures, signifies the attainment of knowledge, wisdom and enlightenment. Loud explosions, in all cultures, signify war, aggression, turmoil. There is no religious basis for the exaltation of noise in this way. Diwali should be a festival used to spread light, not to attack eardrums.
As we saw last week, events took a tragic turn. At one of the heavily attended community events, a man was killed when a large firecracker exploded in his face. A toddler in the crowd was hit by a stray missile and died; another’s life hung in the balance at the time of writing. Things were even worse in India, where several dozen people were killed by fires and fireworks related to Diwali.
Is it not time to rethink? Those things we call ‘fireworks’ are actually highly dangerous explosives. They are sold without proper regulation, and are often set off without adequate supervision. They are poorly packaged and contain incomprehensible instructions.
Grown men start behaving like juveniles when confronted by the explosive power of fire-crackers and rockets. Millions of shillings go up in smoke every year to indulge the immature passions of the well-off. When this stupidity starts resulting in the deaths of young innocents, however, it behoves everyone to stop and think.
There is a bigger issue at play here. Diwali is just one of Kenya’s many religious festivals that has lost its original meaning and been made macabre by modern-day revellers. Christmas was the festival of goodwill and a celebration of love in the world. Commercialisation has corrupted it so thoroughly that it has become a shopping spree, a time of hedonism, indulgence and excess.
Ramadan is the time for all Muslims to fast and experience self-restraint, discipline and denial of desire. It is a time of equalisation: it attunes the few to the deprivations suffered by the many. It culminates in Eid-ul-Fitr, to celebrate the breaking of the fast.
As many Muslims acknowledge, however, modern man has found a way to debase this noble festival, too. Ramadan and Eid are not supposed to be a time for excess; quite the opposite. Yet one only needs to observe the intemperate feasting that takes place every evening and the lavish banquets laid out during the Eid holiday to see that the original idea is lost.
It is perfectly possible to find a balance between enjoyment and spiritual uplift – but we seem to have no idea what that balance is. We can blame modern marketing machines all we like (and they have much to answer for) but the problem ultimately lies in ourselves. We reach into our wallets instead of our hearts. We debase the ideals of our forebears with great disdain (and a generous measure of hypocrisy).
Instead of using religious festivals to sit back and reflect and meditate on the state of the world, we buy junk, strut our stuff, make noise, over-indulge and then collapse. It is sometimes difficult not to wonder what the human animal was given higher consciousness for, given the trivial use made of it.
I have to ask: where are all the opinion shapers? Why do priests and community leaders sit back and allow the utter debasement of their festivals to happen? Why do we measure the boost to the economy when stupidity is exchanged for currency at the shopping tills, but fail to measure the damage to our souls?
Why do YOU get your kids brainwashed from an early age? Why do you not bother to teach them the higher values associated with religious festivals? Why do you reduce it all to gifts and partying? It is not easy to resist the peer pressure, I know: I have found myself succumbing many times. Yet resist we must. There is nobility in the human being, and it must be reclaimed.
Instead of just having a loud party, we should be using our festivals to spread goodwill and understanding. Why blow hundreds of millions in fireworks, when Nairobi still does not have proper street-lighting? Why feast to the point of pain, when thousands around you lack a square meal a day? Why buy crap for your rich relatives, when so many lack the basic tools and utensils of daily life?
Let the Diwali deaths cause us to take stock. There is much to be done, and much that we can all do. If only we bothered to look.
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Well said Sunny. All my life I’ve known Christmas as a time of serious goat eating. Christmas is also a time when the antacid (Eno) people do soaring business.
It may be an uphill task, but we should start questioning the motives behind some of the things we religiously follow year after year. Some are just wasteful.
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Well done Sunny. This is an article that all religious leaders, be they Hindu, Muslim or Christian, should read, internalise and preach to their followers to ensure that the true meaning of the religious festivals that we celebrate is truly understood and practised as opposed to being extravagant.
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This is a spot-on article that bravely tackles a very pertinent issue in today’s festivities. I especially like the fact that you have tackled all major religions. Well done, Sunny.
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Dear Sunny,
As I do on all Sundays without fail, I read your article, “Let’s bring nobility back to festivals.” I couldn’t agree more. Yes indeed, lets. But how?
You said that “it is perfectly possible to find a balance between enjoyment and a spiritual uplift but we seem to have no idea what that balance is.” True, and that’s why we are where we are.
With great communication skill, you laid out all the pertinent questions that define our miserable condition. All these are summed up in your very strong statement that “it is sometimes difficult not to ask what the human animal was given higher consciousness for, given the trivial use made of it”. Kindly give me your attention for a while on this one.
I am fully convinced that the root cause of all our problems is the incompleteness of our education – religious and secular. In my experience, complete education has three aspects to it: the subject of knowledge (i.e. the knower), the object of knowledge and the process of gaining the knowledge.
Our modern education deals only with the objective aspect of knowledge. Therefore, we become very good at whatever objective field of study we pursue. Many blessings – as evidenced by the spectacular progress made in science and technology, in trade and industry, in the arts – have come upon the objective field of life over time. Yet this has been accomplished using only a third of the knowledge capability of the human being.
Illiteracy in the knowledge of the self equally makes a professor of any discipline in the objective field of life and a peasant who has never opened a book susceptible to the same problems in life: greed, vanity, anger, jealousy and false attachment to material things. Sometimes the professor has these vices more in abundance than the peasant.
We sometimes wonder why our religious leaders are not guiding us to the light and we are thus consumed in the darkness of alcoholism, debauchery and aggression. The truth is that we are in the same boat. They don’t know better. They can quote the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad-Gita, from start to finish but that does not make them any better than those of us who may only have heard of those holy books. They can only be qualified to instruct us if they are themselves structured in the knowledge. And the instruction must be practical, not academic. This has nothing to do with intellectual understanding; it is entirely experiential.
At the experiential level, all human differences dissolve. There is no Christian, Hindu, Catholic, Protestant, Kikuyu, Digo, rich, poor, Mzungu, Mhindi, tall, short – or any of the other myriad superficialities. There is only Truth. This is what modern education – religious or secular – has failed to implant in our consciousness. Objectively, we know that God does not belong to any of our tribe, religion, race or gender.
How come we are unable to live according to that knowledge? This is simply because modern education is incomplete. It does not deal with the subjective field of life. The knower is a total stranger to himself. He knows everything else except himself. Whatever he thinks he knows about himself is only from the intellectual, objective level. That is why it is possible, for instance, to know that adultery is bad and yet one still repeatedly commits it. Whoever does not have knowledge of the self structured in his consciousness does not have a preventive mechanism against mistakes and must suffer, regardless of his accumulation of intellectual knowledge.
Modern education alone can never give a human being happiness. An illusion of it, yes, but not the real thing. When you travel a highway on a hot noonday, you see water in the middle distance. When you get there, you find the water is further up the road. You mark the place and drive on. But when you get there, the water is still further up the road. You drive on and on until evening comes and, exhausted and thirsty, you discover there was no water on the road. It was just an illusion.
This is the tragedy of modern education. It is puts you on an endless road to gaining knowledge with a guarantee that you will never arrive. You will never be in a position to say: Yes, I am knowledgeable and because I am knowledgeable, I am free from mistakes. After traveling life’s long road, you get old and claim wisdom. In fact, it is just resignation. Were it wisdom, you would not be falling sick, you would not be getting angry and frustrated with other people. Otherwise, we must ask: what wisdom is there in enduring the same problems that you endured when you were younger? Stoicism is not wisdom.
Dear Sunny, there are techniques that every manager and every worker in the world should know today. I don’t know whether you are recommending them to your valued clients. The human being was indeed created in the best of moulds as the Koran says and in the image of God as the Bible affirms. There is no need to suffer. The enduring wisdom in the Bhagavad-Gita – Further than the furthest, and yet near at hand is That. It is Far and it is Near – implemented practically, will save us from ourselves. Reading and knowing is not enough. In fact, it only adds to the stress, like a thirsty man who knows that water quenches but cannot partake of any.
Let me thank you from the bottom of my heart for “provoking” me into writing this piece to you. I really, really enjoy your articles. Why don’t we agree to make time for a cup of tea sometime on condition that we don’t turn it into an occasion to “make noise, over-indulge and then collapse”?
Kindest Regards,
Roy Gachuhi.
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Roy:
I am delighted to have ‘provoked’ you into writing such a thoughtful piece. You have clearly thought deeply about the life of the human being, and have gone beyond mere reading of sacred texts. I couldn’t agree more: it is perfectly possible to know something is bad, yet continue to do it. It is one thing to have the map, another to walk on the road. We would all gain immensely by just knowing ourselves more. With your permission, I will quote from your comment in a forthcoming piece – perhaps at Christmas time!
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Dear Sunny,
Thanks. By all means, quote from the article. And all the very best wishes.
Kindest regards,
Roy.
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