Though coming from a non-Christian background and a country where the Christian population is a minority of about 7.5%, I have been used to the idea of Christmas as a time of festive cheer, color, lights and music. As a child, even though the only people in my neighborhood were Buddhists and Hindus, my family opted to ‘celebrate’ the day in a non religious manner, perhaps because it must have seemed like a cheerful thing to do. A month or so before Christmas actually arrives and long after, Colombo looks like one big mall with Christmas decorations even though most people putting them up quite possibly are not Christians.
This Christmas in Delhi I missed all that; it has simply come as if through a backdoor, and I guess it will leave also from a back door by nightfall today. The two Churches I go past almost every day in Vasant Kunj seemed quite desolate even yesterday. St Thomas’ Church off Africa Avenue sported a rather sorry looking white paper star on the top of its roof. If this was meant to symbolize the star that guided the wise men in search of the son of god who had just been born according to Christian mythology, then this was a very uninspiring and almost sad simulation. Of course, I have no idea what the interiors of these religious places held for devotees or what individuals for whom this was much more than a single day on the calendar might have done on their own. But from these public spaces, neither a sense of cheer nor a feeling of exuberance was emanating. It was quite gloomy not too unlike the Delhi smog. But of course, a friend told me yesterday that Khan Market had transformed itself to suite what is often expected of Christmas in a commercial sense in most parts of the world. Few businesses had done so too in CP and many Delhi-based internet shopping spaces were selling rather predictable and tiresome Christmas paraphernalia. The lobby of the Asoka Hotel In Delhi had installed a somewhat stout grey rendition of a Christmas tree shorn of its leaves, which looked more like a de-commissioned Scud missile sitting on its smokeless posterior.
But given the largeness of the city, it is entirely possible that Christmas might have come to some places with more glamour and a sense of festivity that I have simply missed. I had neither the time nor the patience to visit a few of the better known malls and see if a packaged form of the moment bedecked with North American commercialized symbolism of the day was more prominently displayed. However, whenever I stopped for traffic, I saw some of the numerous poor folks trying to make a living selling what appeared to be red Santa caps not too far from another intersection where another group of people were trying to sell DVDS and books containing the Bagvat Gita.
But this absence had its blessings. The way in which Christmas ‘cheer’ was commercially manufactured in a place like Colombo, one could easily assume this was celebration that had something to do with simulated rubber-coated snow, a blue eyed bearded white man in a red costume gallivanting around the planet in a not so aerodynamic vehicle pulled by a bunch of hard-board reindeer. In that rendition what was absent was Jesus himself and the way of life he tried to teach.
If that is what typifies Christmas today in many places, I wonder if I should not learn to appreciate its cheerlessness in my new context and appreciate it as just another day.
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