Vasant Panchami!

Despite the limits placed on the celebration of Basant this year, the festival has managed to claim more than ten lives according to news reports while almost a hundred people, including many children, have been injured. The populace of Punjab, where the festival is primarily celebrated, seems divided over whether kite flying should be permanently banned or not. I do not want to get into that debate. My wish is simply to spread a little information about the event that a number of my fellow Punjabis may not have.

Whereas it is common knowledge that Basant is predominantly a Hindu festival, its actual basis is not that commonly known. Basant has been traditionally celebrated on the fifth day of Shukla Paksha (fortnight of the waxing moon). The festival was originally called Vasant Panchami, vasant meaning spring and Panchami the fifth day, which was believed to be the first day of the season of spring.

According to the Hindu Vedas, this day is dedicated to the worship of the goddess Sarasvati. Schools normally remained closed in Hindu areas on this day and children busied themselves in decoration of areas where the goddess was to be worshipped. Kite flying was a small portion of the festivities and gained popularity only in certain areas of the Punjab.

Ask Punjabis, especially Lahoris, and they would vehemently defend Basant claiming that kite flying was a passion and that they just wanted to have fun. They would probably claim that they had no clue about who Sarasvati was and that attaching this cultural occasion with Hinduism was the work of fundamentalist narrow minds.

There is nothing wrong with having fun; but when this fun threatens the life of other members of the society, some rethinking needs to be done. Every year a large number of young boys lose their lives or limbs falling off roofs or being hit by vehicles because their eyes were fixed on where the kite was flying instead of where they were going. A number of others are killed or injured by electrocution. Much more tragic than any of these are the lives, mostly of young children, lost due to injury by the dor. That is no way to die. We just cannot keep threatening the lives of innocent children who are the future of this country, this way. This cannot be our culture. I don’t recommend a complete ban on the practice, but I do think that if this practice is to continue, concrete steps have to be taken to make it a safe one. As long as we cannot come up with a completely safe solution, we must swallow the bitter pill and restrain from having this kind of fun.

Pakistan is not the only country where kite flying is pursued with passion. In fact the sport which originated in Ancient China, is extremely popular in a number of other countries of the world. Somehow, in Pakistan it holds the undesirable distinction of being one of the most fatal sports.

Coming back to Sarasvati, the fact that almost all of our passionate kite flyers know nothing about her is not something to boast about. Ignorance is a curse. I feel that basant nowadays has so little to do with Vasant Panchami that awareness about the origins of the latter can hardly affect the celebration of the former. Nevertheless, knowledge always helps.

Saraswati is the Hindu goddess of knowledge. If we can’t realize the gravity of the fact that innocent people lose their lives due to a simple pastime, maybe we should learn a little from Sarasvati’s prayer, which ends with these words

“Oh Mother Sarasvati remove the ignorance of my mind and bless me with the eternal knowledge.”