Madness has been building up during the past few days and for almost a fortnight, and must have started hitting the climactically-exciting points from last night. Basant-propelled activities would head for their aftermath from tonight, though a state of hang-up would persist for some time.
Festivals and festivities are a part of people’s lives across the world and represent a welcome departure from the drab of daily life. Some events attain international status and grow into a distinguishing feature of a city or a country. Basant, as it has come to be celebrated in Lahore, has developed into a widely-followed festival.
However, the manner in which the people go for it, almost with a vengeance, is both incomprehensible and, from the viewpoint of many people, to put it mildly, somewhat wanting in decency. Basant has started representing a craziness that is difficult to explain and defies categorization.
One does not wish to behave like a spoilsport, try to swim against the tide or identify with bigoted elements that weigh things with tampered scales of religion. However, abandoning all sense of proportion, indeed obliterating all demarcations of sanity, even if that is for a short period of time is, to say the least, a disturbing development.
The process of an essentially innocent, at worst frivolous but joyful activity turning into a festival, then mega event and finally get dominated by the supreme, unadulterated display of decadence is a situation that needs to be examined and analyzed. One should make an attempt to understand the causes of the change, if nothing else.
One explanation can be that a huge vacuum marked people’s lives and it was crying to be filled. Basant stepped in with its capacity for raising spirits, such as the soaring of kites, and provided relief to a socially-deprived, economically-distressed and politically-oppressed society. It served as a meeting point for the classes. That happened but without reducing distances. Material gains and happiness filtered down but to no specific end, certainly not to a vital one.
A meeting of the twain, the haves and have-nots, is perhaps too idealistic an expectation. But must it conclude on a negative note what initially gives the impression of being positive? When kites are cut — lost in encounters in the skies and float down to be looted — life would resume its normal course. Feelings of resentment can then be revived in an intensified form.
Basant has come to be an occasion for demonstration of wealth, mostly of unearned denomination; even legitimate means are suspected and wide-open cupboards are viewed as shelter for skeletons. The festivities are now associated not just with kite flying but, to quite an extent, with depravity. It is, in parts, a version of hedonism the philosophers who identified the attitude are unlikely to have imagined.
Those viewing the scene from a distance may not have an exact, even close idea of what kind of event Basant has become. While it has many angles and aspects, the festival revolves around money; participation is prohibitively expensive. Nevertheless, the number of people who make special arrangements for Basant, as also those who ensure their presence in Lahore, has been constantly increasing.
The size of the crowd this year may, however, not have been comparable with the strength of guests who descended on the city last year. But there is a simple reason for decline in attendance for Basant. A large contingent of guests had arrived in Lahore from India last year, while the freeze in the relations between the two countries has disallowed participation this year. The governments of both India and Pakistan, the former much more, have been discouraging their citizens from communicating with each other in any manner. Under the circumstances, Indian guests have been forced to stay away from Lahore’s Basant this year.
By last year, Basant had started serving as a more effective means for improving the Pakistan-India relations than diplomacy practised on any track. However, while the Indian people may have been debarred from visiting Lahore, smugglers of the two countries did not have a problem exporting and importing Indian yarn for making string for flying kites. Pakistan’s kite fliers use yarn from India every year on Basant and in that respect, this year was no different. There remained the link of a thread between the people of the two countries.
Yarn was not the only costly component of Basant. Vast resources were required to celebrate the festival in a really befitting manner. There was no shortage of material means; money and a lot else flowed like water during Basant. There is no reason for criticizing people who can afford to indulge their fancies, but most people have no idea of the bill for Basant.
There is no estimate, not even a realistic guesstimate. There is no basis or yardstick for calculating the cost of Basant. It wasn’t an event involving spending worth millions of rupees; billions would be nearer the mark. Figures of one to two billion rupees have been circulating, but the possibility of a bigger amount is not to be ruled out. There, however, are two ways of looking at things.
One: this was immense waste. Two: money circulated and reached many an empty hand. Unfortunately, much of it just went down the drain. The graph of people living under the subsistence line maintained its upward trend. One doesn’t expect Basant or any such event to make a dent in the miseries of the populace, but the taste is soured and that makes excessive lavishness callous if not criminal. The expense may be disproportionate even to the pleasure it provided. But why should anyone sit in judgment on practices some people can afford?
But the ugly aspects of Basant merely represented a widespread malaise. Some relatives attended a wedding recently where fireworks cost about one-and-a-half million rupees over three days. The number of dishes served was virtually countless. While most members of the groom’s party just walked over from one open space, of course fully and colourfully covered, to another close by, immediate relatives were transported in horse drawn carriages. Lahore has fancy carriages available on rent for people who wish to celebrate the wedding of their children with pomp and what they consider style.
The groom rode a horse ahead of the wedding party. That was traditional; so was his sehra but not all the way. The headgear was distinguished by threads of gold, as distinct from the golden threads used in making it. The sehra, I am told, cost nearly Rs200,000. Needless to say, this wasn’t something rare. Practically every evening, wealth is exhibited in an uninhibited way across the city, mostly in parks and empty spaces.
The city is passing through what currently looks like an unending Spring festival celebrated by the government, the classes and by the masses, too, because there is plenty of leftover, innumerable kites to be looted and a lot of alms to be collected. Which means that what has been on show during Basant would remain in play the rest of the year, the vastness of the vacuum would keep getting stretched and the hollow in the lives of the people would continue deepening.
Madness has been building up during the past few days and for almost a fortnight, and must have started hitting the climactically-exciting points from last night. Basant-propelled activities would head for their aftermath from tonight, though a state of hang-up would persist for some time.
