Mystic Mantra: Why do we celebrate festivals?

In Indian culture, there was a time when there used to be a festival every day of the year — 365 festivals in a year — because a festival is a tool to bring life to a state of exuberance and enthusiasm. The entire culture was in a state of celebration. If today was ploughing day, it was a kind of celebration. Tomorrow was planting day, another kind of celebration. Day after tomorrow was weeding, that was a celebration. Harvesting, of course, is still a celebration. But in the last 400 or 500 years, poverty has come to our country, and we have not been able to celebrate every day. People are satisfied if they just get some simple food to eat.

So all the festivals fell away and only 30 or 40 festivals remain. We are not even able to celebrate those now because we have to go to the office or do something else daily. So people usually celebrate only around eight or 10 festivals annually.

Nowadays, unfortunately, a festival means they give you a holiday, and you wake up only at 12 noon. Then you eat a lot and go for a movie or watch television at home. It wasn’t like that earlier. A festival meant the whole town would gather in a place and there would be a big celebration. A festival meant we got up at four in the morning, and very actively, lots of things happened all over the house.

To bring back this culture in people, Isha celebrates four important festivals: Pongal or Makarasank-ranti, Mahashivarathri, Dussehra and Diwali. If we don’t create something like this, by the time the next generation comes, they will not know what a festival is. They will just eat, sleep and grow up without concern for another human being. All these aspects were brought into Indian culture just to keep a man active and enthusiastic in so many ways. The idea behind this was to turn our whole life into a celebration.

If you approach everything in a celebratory way, you learn to be non-serious about life but absolutely involved. The problem with most human beings right now is, if they think something is important, they will become dead serious about it. If they think it is not so important, they will become lax about it — they don’t show the necessary involvement.