“Every generation Blames the one before”
These opening lines from The Living Years, the hit soft rock ballad of the late 1980s by British rock band Mike and the Mechanics, in essence, sums up a paradigm shift with regard to the concept of “generational gap” or to be somewhat more precise, generational comparisons. How often have we compared classic Hindi movie songs or films to contemporary Bollywood ‘masala’ numbers, tranquil towns with a motorised machine (read Fiat or Ambassador) here and there to the mad traffic snarls of today’s metros where both motorised machines and homo sapiens move forward inch-by-inch, to the quality of air, quality of ‘good books’, quality of pure vegetables, old-time weddings, festival celebrations like Eid, Holi, Durga Puja, Diwali, Christmas, Bihu of yesteryears, and what not. You name it. It all literally boils down to hamare zamane mein toh ……! Or agor puronidinbur je iman bhal asil.
Here I am subtly tempted to take you all on a nostalgic trip down memory lane. I shall try my best to sprinkle some sweet-little anecdotes of Durga Puja from my childhood days as a school kid from the mid-1980s and 1990s growing up in this ever-growing city of Guwahati. The earliest, and perhaps the faintest memories of Durga Puja in Guwahati as a child was that of my late-father holding my hand sometime around the mid-1980s and walking to the nearby Ganeshguri puja pandal. The pandal was hardly a ten-minute walk from our family residence located at Debdaru Path, behind the erstwhile old MLA hostel. The first thing my father and I used to do was to gorge ourselves on some syrupy jalebis. Once the gastronomical engagements were over, we would head straight into the pandal along with the crowd and watch the idols of Maa Durga and other Gods and Godesses on display from close range. I still vividly remember as a little boy once getting the fright of my life when the organisers had set up the sound-system in such a way that the demon would yell and scream after every 15 seconds or so. I would almost collapse to the ground as a ‘fainted corpse’, only to regain my senses a little later. But what struck me most during those days of pandal hopping were people’s obeisance towards the Goddess, well-behaved crowds, including youths, and most importantly the human-to-human interaction of families in the pandals. More often than not, they would know each other and bump into each other as well. After all, it was a small-town Gauhati back then in the 1980s.
These, and much more, had caught my attention over the years as Durga Puja somewhat has transformed itself into an extravaganza of sorts or people enjoying night life in Guwahati, for a change. The gossamer police bandobast back then was a clear indication that there would hardly be any trouble-makers or inebriated youths around. One more anecdote, although not directly related to Durga Puja was that my father and I used to cross over to the other side of the main road from our Debdaru Path and walk into the small by-lanes inside the MLA hostel. This must be around 1981-82.
Things have changed! The police now are no less than the quintessential Rakshaasa standing guard for the hooligans hovering in and around the pandals. I must reiterate that back then during my childhood days, the food and the frenzy, the colours and the crowds were all somehow symbiotic. I now miss the ‘peace’ amid the chaos then.
(The writer is an international award-winning poet, lyricist and columnist. He presently teaches English and Social Sciences at his alma mater – Don Bosco School, Panbazar, Guwahati.)