Editorial
Greetings of Pahela Baishakh
Let's celebrate our cultural ethos
PAHELA Baishakh is back here with all the colour and appeal of Bengali culture anchored in history and tradition. The day is celebrative in a truly festive mould with people rollicking on the streets of Dhaka, and elsewhere in the country, to welcome the Bengali New Year. It is an expression of their yearning not to be cut off from the roots but to renew their faith in them.
The vivacity and liveliness of the spring, the season of flowers, are reflected in the way the day is celebrated as women attired in white-red sarees and men wearing colourful panjabees come out on the streets, away from the drudgery of life. On this particular occasion the streets of Dhaka belong to the people at large, a short-lived egalitarian phenomenon. The delight is shared by all and sundry and followers of all religions. That is a unique aspect of the occasion; it reminds us of the dim and distant past when social and communal harmony was the order of the day.
Pahela Baishakh has a great significance for traders and business community as a whole. To them, it is a fresh beginning marked through inviting friends and well wishers, as they open the ledger for the new year popularly known as 'halkhata'. So, Pahela Baishakh leaves behind all that is stale and worn-out. And Tagore's famous song "Esho hey Baishakh, Esho, Esho" delivers the message in a most emphatic manner. It is time to look forward with great optimism, forgetting the past and dispatching all that is outdated and outmoded to history.
The day is actually rooted in the agro-based rural society where the Bengali year was counted as the crop year. It dates back to the times when agriculture was the lone source of survival of the people. Today in an urban setting , however, people are content to celebrate it as a social festival.
The day has assumed even greater significance as some religious bigots oppose the celebrations on the most inexplicable plea of those being anti-religion. The scars of the Ramna Batamul tragedy will never be obliterated from our collective psyche. A social resistance against such monstrous attitude to our pristine culture has to be organised to guarantee our cultural freedom and no occasion is better suited to express our solidarity with the people's cultural rights than Pahela Baishakh.
Shuvo Nababarsha.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments