Kolkata: Dassara Puja

  Kolkata (Calcutta), West Bengal, India
Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Apologies for being woefully behind in blogging, Sikkim doesn't exactly have reliable or plenty internet connections.

Traditional Puja

Ankit and my visit to Kolkata coincided with the beginning of the Indian festival season, beginning with Dassara/Navratri and ending with Diwali towards the end of October. As many of you know, there are three main gods in the Hindu philosophy: Lord Brahma (creator), Lord Vishnu (preserver) and Lord Shiva (destroyer). While many worshippers tend to worship one Lord over the other, all three are vital to Hinduism and are central to one of the main themes of reincarnation or the circle of life. Much of North India are Shaivites - worshipping Shiva as their main Lord. Shiva's consort/wife goes by many names Parvathi/Durga/Kali and Kolkata is a major Durga/Kali (angry version) worshipping city. Shiva's children are Ganesha (protector from obstacles), Lakshmi (goddess of wealth), Saraswati (goddess of knowledge) and Kartikay (god of war and bestower of spiritual powers).

Global Warming Puja

Navratri is a 9 day celebration of the children of Shiva and Dassara is the celebration of Kali's triumph over a demon and is symbolic of good over evil and is central to the Ramayana epic. The mythology is that Durga/Parvathi is the protector of the Himalayas and also the protector of Ravana - the non-aryan antagonist in the Ramayana that lives in Sri Lanka and kidnaps Lord Rama's wife Sita. Ravana has lots of wisdom, is a demi-god, but is a wicked person and wronged Lord Rama. Lord Rama pleads with Lord Shiva to ask Parvathi/Durga to leave her guard down, thus exposing Ravana to Lord Rama's wrath, by distracting her to kill a bull-headed non-aryan. The festival of Dassara is the celebration of Kali's triumph over this demon and takes place over four days, culminating in a burning of larger-than-life sized effagies of Ravana.

Dassara at night

Dassara is celebrated in Kolkata by each community putting together its own temporary, unique and artisitic puja. Everyone in the community - Hindu and non-Hindus - participates in this great celebration and competes for city wide trophies and cash prizes as the puja is a source of great community pride. This is another example of the Bengali mantra of acceptance and community over sad communalism. We saw pujas made from mesh wire, thatch, plaster of paris - all extravagant and large enough to resemble temples with musicians and worshippers in attendance. There was even one that likened Kali's victory over the demon to man's triumph over climate change, pollution, poverty and suffering.

In our first night together in Kolkata we met up with this Bengali named Pavan Singh - a spiritual wanderer and local tour guide, who is the treasurer of a local puja club. Quite full of himself, dubbed RP (righteous pimp), but filled with a good soul and outwardly good intentions, we were joined by his friend Ruchi (an Armenian Indian) dubbed SF (shady friend), who in actuality was a really honest and upfront dude. RP escorted us around to all the various nighttime pujas. Despite most of the Hindus fasting and abstaining from alcohol, Dassara is an all night celebration with families and people out everywhere eating and enjoying the holiday. RP knew virtually everyone in town from school or elsewhere and we were able to skirt all of the lines to visit all the pujas. You gotta love the insider's view of a city.

We met up with RP's school friends Sandeep, Jitender and Shyam at the main festival grounds. These were some high quality individuals who were genuinely nice, warm and hospitable: Sandeep is a 28 year old running a construction company and Jitender is working locally. Being in Jitender's hood, he know absolutely everyone, and even was able to return a pack of spilled smigs - sans a few of them - and get a refund from a local shopkeeper. An interesting bit of cross cultural differences: in talking about Malabar, I found out they had never heard of Bob Marley. Getting over my initial shock at this revelation, I had never heard of the Bengali singers they mentioned. Touche. All Hindus, they were fiercely pro-India and loved the US. They agreed that Bush is a war criminal, but love and are envious of the level of development and relatively low levels of corruption and red tape that exist in the American business environment. Ankit and I had a genius masala dosa in the festival grounds and then were treated by Sandeep to a panni purri feast. For those who don't know, on day 1 back in India this is like pouring gasoline all over yourself, lighting a match and hoping you don't burn. Panni is water and a key ingredient to this delectable street snack. Whatever doesn't kill you (we survived), only makes you(r stomach) stronger. The night ended with us discussing the national sport of cricket - the boys were all very optimistic for the upcoming test matches against Australia (India/Oz drew the first one and India destroyed Oz in the second test by 320 runs). All of them - including RP who didn't appear to be a sports fan - knew every little thing about the two individual medalists, Sania Mirza's life story and past Indian cricket glories. When you've got slight sporting success and large national pride, you've gotta know your stuff.

Dancing with the kids at Puja

That night, over some chais, we met Raja who is a local reporter for R Plus. We arranged to travel with him the next day as he wanted to do a story on foreigners and PIO (people of Indian origin) visiting Dassara puja. We essentially received a fully guided tour with a driver of 7-9 pujas throughout Kolkata - far from the tourist and central areas. This Italian girl, Raffaella, that we met was also featured in the story and at one point was adoringly surrounded by 3 teenage Bengali girls curious to learn about her. Raffaella is beginning doctoral research in comparative literature on women Muslim writers in Bengali and Hindi. Raffaella and I joined in the community dance with all of the teenagers at this local puja and it was great fun. Every single community organizer was so honored to have us visit their puja from so far away, which definitely made a lasting impression.  At another one, one of the people we "interviewed" (many of the questions were force fed to us by Raja for the story) was this adorable young woman named Nivrendra who works in advertising for the Times of India. It's always nice to chat with similar aged people of different cultures (particularly cute ones) to compare similiraties and differences in our lives. Throughout the course of the day and the various chais, Raja and us discussed life in the US, religion, racism, Bengali history and heritage.

Thatch hut tribal puja

Ankit and I had a funny running joke the whole day as to how Raja could skew the footage to spin a "different" kind of story. When asked what we thought about Puja, one of Ankit's comments was "it's beautiful, but it is kind of sad that so much money is poured into a festival when there are so many better uses for the cash". The camera basically followed is all day long doing everything from riding in the car, getting in and out of the car, and taking pictures of various pujas and temples.  Some of the footage of us in the car, because of the polluting vehicles, was of a bearded Hari with a bandana tied around my face, exposing only my eyes.  Finally, as we were trying to sort out where all Raja and crew had taken us throughout the day, the cameraman had footage of us charting routes across a city map.  Needless to say, if the Fox News Channel owned R Plus, I'm pretty certain the story wouldn't have been about foreigners visiting puja. 

Raja the reporter and Raffaella

After saying bye to Raja - I am still trying to get a video of the story as we missed it on TV because we left Kolkata - we ran into Pavan and Ruchi on the street and a bunch of us went to lunch. Included in this crew was a Dutchman names Christian who had once cycled 7,000km from Rotterdam to Kyrgikistan!

Christian the rikshaw driver

Also met this odd dude from Perth who is making his way to Iran - Anvar, we must do it! Raffaella, Ankit and I capped off this wonderful day (and our last night in Kolkata) with a fantastic North Indian meal on Park St (with WWE playing on the TV in the background) discussing Italian politics and Berkeley life.

Wire mesh puja

During the half day or so before we made our way to our overnight train up to Darjeeling , Ankit and I took care of some errands and had chai with our local guy about ten times - hopefully helping to fund that adorable 10 year old girl's education. We met this Bangladeshi dude, Masu, who was visiting India for the first time and whose dad was a captain in the East Pakistan army during the 1971 separation. He had great things to say about Dhaka, despite what you hear, and I was pleasantly surprised that as a devout Muslim he believed in no division between religions.

Our chai guy, brother of the sweet chai girl

Our sweet chai girl

We hopped an overnight train in three tier A/C (3A), which surprisingly left on time, bound for NJP/Siliguri, a worthless town that is a painful 4 hour jeep ride south of Darjeeling. We had some nice travelers with us - Arun, a jewelry wholesaler on his way up to Assam to tend to his shop, and Shabnam, an Assamese CivE student in Kolkata on her way home or the holidays and to meet some suitors her parents lined up. After having her blame all of India's current economic woes on American excess (forgetting how that excess allowed for phenomenal growth in Indian equity markets the last five years), we ended up having some great discussions and learned a lot about generational and cultural differences between the three of us. Alas, talk of boyfriends/arranged marriages and Bollywood films is what brought us all together (though I contributed nil to the Bollywood discussion). Funny sidenote, when asked how many people live in Kolkata, she replied 10 crore. That is 100mm, or ~1/10 of the Indian population. In her defense as an engineer in India they move they don't measure by the 000s as we do, but she quickly realized her error (there are ~15-20mm in Kolkata). She's a sweet girl, but a product of the SMS/chatting generation and thus I've received many emails in code and am now the recipient of too many email forwards.

On to Darjeeling... our first glimpse of the Sacred Himalayas and some fresh and lush mountain air.

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Disclaimer: Some of you may be asking, why isn't this idiot putting up any pics for us to see of this wonderful Dassara? Answer, this idiot managed to move pics from Kolkata/Darjeeling to a thumb drive and lose it within the first two weeks of travel and DID NOT make another backup copy. Live and learn - thankfully it was early in the journey. Will hopefully upload some of Ankit's pics at some point.