You have heard this before: One Bengali makes a bhadralok, two make an adda, and three make a Durga Pujo Committee. What do four Bengalis make? Well, four Bengalis make two Durga Pujo committees. Right? I am telling you this first-hand knowledge of pujo pandals in my Gurgaon suburb, home to 20 endangered Royal Bengal families. And it works. To know how to scan the pages of the TOI for the disproportionately high coverage of Ma Durga in this season of festivals where Navratri, Ramzan and even Ramlila are fighting for precious column-centimetre space. So, you know what an invasion by the Bengal Army looks like.
Some years ago, ChittoPark, a.k.a. Delhi’s EPDP colony celebrated the silver jubilee anniversaries of four Durga Pujo Committees, each with an exclusive pandal barely 50 feet apart. So, what makes the bhadralok today? It’s elective identities for the loss of the original one. For a long, the bhadralok has marvelled at the make-believe identities of his illustrious forebears, right from Lakhsman Sen who abandoned his throne at the sight of 12 advancing Pathan horsemen to Mrinal Sen, the last of Bengal’s maverick movie makers who abandoned reason to the interpretation of cine-goers. Since then, the bhadralok, his intellect Bangalored, has been in desperate search of an identity that makes him stand out in a crowd.
So, in steps Ma Durga. If you look at it carefully, the neo-bhadralok has never had it so good in his life as he does in the four days of Durga Puja. The all-encompassing, all-over-riding, all-overarching, all-India Pujo Committee — with exclusive rights even over your marital space -- provides the bhadralok with the untrammelled opportunity to reassert his identity through a pujo committee rosette proudly pinned to his panjabi-shirt. Here’s what a typical pujo committee allows the bhadralok to assert in all-caps in an either or a sequence of the hierarchical committee ladder: Patron-in-chief, Patron, President, Vice President, Secretary, Assistant Secretary, Treasurer, Culture Committee Secretary, Bhog Committee Secretary, Pandal Committee Secretary, Collections (chanda) Committee Secretary, Souvenir Committee Secretary, Lighting Committee Secretary, Bhisarjan Committee Secretary, Park Maintenance Committee Secretary, with an assistant secretary appended to every slot for every committee in the name of Mother Earth, oops, Durga! But then, there are only so many committees that the bhadralok’s imagination can take him to. So, when the House-Full sign goes up, it’s time for another pujo committee across the neighbourhood park where there was originally one. Rokkhey karo, Ma!
Mother, save the Bong!
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