How your religious festivities affect our Environment.

Sanskriti Bhatnagar
Nov 4 · 5 min read

Festivals in India are celebrated with great vigor, zeal, and passion. Many people seem to often ignore the repercussions of their majestic festivities that are faced by a majority of the population. Instead, the people choose to focus on the glitz and glamour that surrounds their festivities.

Source: https://bh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A4%9A%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%A4%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%B0:Diwali_Festival.jpg

Festivals are usually when families come together and are happy and relaxed, they celebrate by performing rituals that have been passed down from generation to generation when the state of the environment wasn’t as worrisome as it is now. In the current scenario, people all over the world are fighting to stay alive. Outdated rituals and blind followers cause a lot more environmental damage than they think they do. Festivals like Diwali, Baisakhi, Holi, Ganesh Chaturthi, Durga Pooja, etc. cause incessant damage to the environment.

Diwali witnesses a large chunk of the Indian population indulging in the lighting of diyas, firecrackers, and candles. The number of people who have stopped burning firecrackers has reduced significantly in states where they have been banned, but there is a larger number of states that legalize the burning of crackers as opposed to those who ban it. Diwali, a festival meant to celebrate good, happiness, and the truth, causes harm to Asthmatic patients. More recently, it has been affecting everyone. As of 2019, the Delhi NCR has been covered by a heavy blanket of smog, this affects all those living in the region with people choking on thin air.

People have repeatedly complained of sore throats, blocked passages, irritated eyes, chest pains, and indigestion caused by this melancholic situation. The government has frequently taken decisions to ensure that its citizens can breathe but to little avail.

Holi is a widely loved festival, where people use colors and water to celebrate the victory of good over evil. The commercialization of Holi has caused people to overuse water and chemical colors. If this festival were to be boiled down, one would realize that Holi is no longer innocent and is just a ground for people to use unnecessary amounts of water and colors that are nothing short of a chemical or toxin attack. Holi is also an occasion for people to blare music at copious volumes. The celebration is a playground that allows for noise, soil, water pollution as well as serious damage to humans.

Festivals like Ganesh Chaturthi and Durga Puja see crowds come to immerse the idols of their precious gods. The statues that they immerse are made of chemicals, toxins, and synthetic colors that erode aquatic life. The colors, when in contact with water, form a thin film on the water surface that doesn’t allow oxygen to pass through, which results in the mass mutilation of the aquatic ecosystem.

Chhath Puja, a festival celebrated in Northern India, has people come in from all around the country to water bodies to offer prayers. Their love and devotion to said water bodies can be seen evidently in the condition of the littered river banks soon after the festival.

Bakra Eid, a festival celebrated by the followers of Islam, sees a massacre of goats. This mass killing of living beings can surely not be what God expects from their disciples, and it can surely not be good for the ecosystem.

One of the most popular festivals, Christmas cannot be exempt from the environmental radar. As of 2017, close to 96 million trees are chopped down for Christmas in the United States and Europe alone. Imagine the number if we were to consider the other continents while estimating the amount. This hellish genocide of trees is not only taking away oxygen from all living creatures but also snatches homes away from animals that do not have a say in what they go through.

During Dusshera, the entire country is busy attending the countless melas. These melas are the site of unceasing pollution in all available forms. The burning of effigies across all fairs is common, and causes widespread pollution and leaves a cloud of smoke hanging in the air for a week after the actual event. Food is avidly wasted and garbage can be found anywhere in a 5-kilometer radius around the fair. People refuse to be held accountable for their misdeeds and would rather hold their governments accountable, and vice-versa. The blame game is their favorite game to play.

However, one cannot just attribute environmental damage to festivals and customs without considering the rituals associated with the diverse religions in our country. These rituals are undertaken during the most mundane of tasks, take a moment to consider what happens after a family member dies.

In the Hindus, it is common to see the dead being burnt and then their ashes being scattered in “holy” rivers so the departed soul attains satisfaction and peace. There exists a widespread misconception when it comes to it being healthy to spread the ashes of the departed in water bodies, for it is unhealthy for all those who use these water bodies as a primary source for water. Moreover, ashes do not go in the water, period. People also choose to bathe in the ash-ridden water further contaminating the liquid.

The burning of the dead followed in quite a few religions also emits smoke into the atmosphere. People insist on burning their recently deceased relatives claiming it is what they would have wanted without understanding the damage this does to their ecosystem.

Let us not forget the concept of the “Big Fat Indian Wedding”, where people are always trying to outdo each other trying to achieve the perfect Instagram wedding. In pursuit of this “perfect” wedding, more often than not, people will forget the actual union of people and come for food and aesthetically pleasing pictures. The food from these grandiose weddings is mostly wasted, the loud music annoys almost everyone in the surrounding area, water is used for unnecessary theatrical purposes, and flowers are snatched from their natural habitats to satisfy the ornamental wants of ungrateful and vacuous human beings.

Other rituals like the havans use wood, which comes from trees. The involvement of trees and flowers in almost every ritual in every religion causes an acute shortage in the number of trees available to mankind. Trees are integral to human survival, as is clean air and water.

Our world has come to a state where most people hold complete disregard for the environment, which is blatantly seen in their lust for money and virality. Capitalism plagues the world deeply, festivals and celebrations have not been spared. People and their greed have driven the world into a chaotic scene where people do not care about the aftermath of their actions- which in this case involves the sale of firecrackers, colors, hazardous statues, fake water, and whatnot. And understandably so, in the midst of avarice, the true meaning of the festivals have been lost.

Humans have taken the environment for granted and are now facing the consequences of their perpetual hatred against the environment. Although they are starting to realize their mistakes, the actions that they have undertaken to rectify their erred ways fall short to the fatal amount of damage that they have already done. Nonetheless, there are always going to be dogmatic gits who will never understand the gravity of the extent of the environmental damage that they relentlessly cause, or as usual, will play the blame game and continue to deny their shortcomings.

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