Dear Student | On Brouhaha and Critical Engagement
In the context in which I was raised, birthdays are your day, and in the weeks leading up to it, my mum would plan outfits, the cake to be cut, and the candies and gifts to be shared. My parents made tiny hampers for my first-grade birthday celebrations — two chocolates (my mum thought, what if my classmates liked to go fifty-fifty with a friend or a sibling), an eraser, a pencil and a sharpener. I still remember being fascinated with how our father folded the opening of the plastic bags containing the goodies, running each back and forth through a candle flame to join them. Ecstatic, watching the plastic melt and collapse to seal the packet, my brother and I were thoroughly impressed to discover this talent our father had managed to keep hidden from us until that day.
There was (what I would later call) brouhaha leading up to the B-day, and just like that, the day came and went. I remember thinking — “That’s it!?” We waited all this while, and it came and went. In an instant! Because it was also the last day of school, I stood there with the ten other classmates as the remaining sang, ‘May God bless you, dear 11-names-in-a-sequence’. Those who had birthdays three days later also advanced their celebrations before the school closed for break. The six-year-old me lost interest in birthdays because I was not the cynosure of all eyes, and the birthday song that day was serenaded to what seemed like more than half the class.
But something else also happened.
I also felt this energy dissipating, a loss of enthusiasm. This feeling of futility (not the word but the feeling) lingering through the evening after I cut the cake, ‘Is this what I am going to wait for till next year, and then again for the year after ?’ On the other hand, my brother slept giddy on his birthdays and would wake up chirpy with the words, “For my next birthday…” planning for next year as if it would return next month. Our existential dilemmas continue to remain quite distinct to this day.
Slowly, I observed this ebb and flow characterising all celebrations — Diwali, New Year’s Eve, and most importantly, weekends and school nights. In the years to follow, I have sometimes begrudgingly participated, at times outrightly rejected, and later, upon attaining some ease (that I think has to do with age), have partaken in the sacred and secular rituals of the social and academic calendars of the contexts in which I have found myself. I cannot deny the emotional and cultural significance of some of it and the effervescence such moments of love, joy, and sadness build between us as social beings.
Even while engaging in these practices, I don’t forget that these so-called inherited and sometimes uncritically handed down sets of actions have assumed an air of sacrosanctity that any deviation from would invite adverse consequences. In these times of cacophonous fervour, where families also stand divided, rituals and their underlying intention must be challenged with curiosity, candour and kindness. Sometimes, I fall short of the gentleness I just championed for in the last line, with no shortage of forthrightness, the brunt of which is borne by those closest to me.
I do go back to them and apologise. Sometimes, the forgiveness I seek is utterly half-hearted, mainly to not let the silence shut down the communication before I am ready and willing to say the sorry I genuinely mean to say and they unequivocally deserve to hear. I also, without wasting any time, quickly go back to being the one who translates the meaning of the bhajans and aartis sung to remind, at the expense of being persistently annoying, that parampara is being dynamically redefined and reinvented in these irksome moments and that our static interpretations would only cause damage to our relationships as much to our intelligence, creativity and culture.
Dear Student, much of what you study in a liberal arts curriculum requires critical thinking. This education would also give you a vocabulary to articulate ideas and experiences for which you didn’t have a language till now, sometimes to the puzzlement of those who cannot tally this new you with the person they have known all this time. While learning new and vibrant ideas, remember that uncritically embracing catchphrases in the name of critical ideas is as fallacious as accepting ossified traditions without questioning them.
