In the age of televised search for the Eid moon, anticipation and expectation cannot be sustained longer than the commercial break in a television talent show lasts. No elongated build-ups, no anxious hours of expectancy

Happiness comes and goes too fast. And we move on — or at least are expected to move on — leaving both our joys and sorrows behind.

That perhaps explains why we have moved inexorably from five-day cricket matches to Twenty20. But that is another subject, though one that is not unrelated to how people in Lahore have — or had? — an entire night to themselves to get ready for Eid, each in their own way.

Before ready-made garments replaced the tailor-made clothes and before cone mehndi supplanted the home-made henna, the process of preparation for Eid was as important as the celebrations. Or perhaps even more. Instead of one grand finale, forgive the idiot box lingo, we had an endless series of small steps, each rewarding and contributory to the overall festive spirit in its own small way.

Fundamentally, chaand raat, or the night before Eid day, is a celebration of the profane and the mundane at the end of the holy month and in the run up to an essentially religious festival. It is all about earthly pleasures and worldly joys after a month marked by ethereal activity and otherworldly piety. And Lahoris, perhaps more than anyone else in the land of the pure, have this reputation of being so grounded in the mundane that the return to business as usual after a whole month of having to live in another mode afforded them a perfect excuse to revel in the ordinariness of their humdrum lives.

At their boisterous best, they come out in droves, thronging the marketplace and the public square and throwing decorum and decency out the window to indulge in all the stuff that ordinary lives are made of — buying and selling, fun and frolic, et al.

Rowdy motorcyclists, with silencers turned off to make a deafening statement of their vibrancy, crowd the thoroughfares. But this is of recent origin. In the olden days, boys would swagger through the narrow lanes of Anarkali bazaar ogling the shoppers of the opposite gender while ostensibly pretending to window-shop for the big day ahead.

But their presence, even though annoying, was hardly a deterrence for housewives and their young daughters to make one last big dash to the bazaar for filling gaps in their Eid shopping — a matching dupatta, the missing nose-pins, the fancied earrings and an odd pair of shoes for someone in the family who could not make it to the market herself.

The makeshift stalls of bangles and mehndi drew the biggest crowds and the best places to see how business bustled on chaand raat were Anarkali, Ichhra bazaar, Moon Market in Allama Iqbal Town and Liberty in Gulberg — until a few years ago, that is. Security concerns have of late taken a lot of zing out of the chaand raat pull of these places, though some signs of the buzz of the old still survive in the form of pensive looking, late evening shoppers who can be seen looking for golden shoes for their daughters or silk sherwanis for their sons.

Once, in the distant past, the neighbourhood tailor, the local hairdresser and some grand old lady who knew all the best formulas for mixing mehndi and applying it in the most exquisite patterns were the most sought after people on chaand raat. And the attention they got in the span of a few hours of that night could easily make up for any real or imagined slights they had to endure during the rest of the year.

But garment stores, beauty salons and boys at the mehndi stalls took care of them before themselves being seen off by the terrorists whose no-frills-attached suicide vest requires skills that artisans of yonder years would never feel envious of. And not just because of the security or lack thereof!

The change has come in more ways than one. As a result, for better or for worse, Lahoris are losing their penchant for making the run-up to a big event momentous by marking every inch of it with some memorable activity. The arrival of spring is no longer preceded by elaborate manufacturing of kites and kite-string. The self-induced ecstatic wait for the city's most cherished drummer to show up at the stroke of midnight at a sufi shrine stands banned.

Few, if any, seem to have the time and energy to cook haleem at home, let alone try making shabdeg for an entire night on a low wood fire. When it is not bombed, the Thursday gathering at the shrine of Data Gunj Bakhsh — the city's patron saint — gets reduced to a photo-op for Lahore's who's who come to drape the sarcophagus with sheets of green cloth. The legendary Mela Charaghan, the veritable festival of lights, has come to be known through a single snapshot of some oddball dancing to the click of the news cameras.

Lahore's famed chaand raat also seems to have suffered this loss. While the devil-may-care types still prefer to have a night out, television has bound most of the rest. When we are not tuned into any of the numerous but monotonously similar Eid shows, we find ourselves listening to mullahs slugging it out among themselves on sighting or otherwise of the Eid moon.

Or worse still, the not-so-eerie premonitions spewed by myriad talk show hosts and their perpetual guests of an imminent implosion of everything around us make us wonder whether an Eid, let alone a chaand raat, is worth having at all.