Dusshera - A celebration and an awakening

If you ask me what my favorite festival - I would call it Dusshera (or Dasara, the way South Indians call it). The festival lasts 9 days/nights (also called 'Navaratri') culminating in 'VijayaDasami' (the victorious tenth day). Different parts of India celebrate Dusshera in different ways - some as a home coming of Lord Rama after vanquishing the demon king, Ravana; some others as the victory of Mother Goddess Durga over the demon, Mahishasura.

In South India, Dusshera is a season of dolls, prayer, songs, dance, sweets and sharing. My mother would usually start cleaning our home about a week ahead (including re-arranging the attics, giving away unused stuff and throwing away unusable stuff). We would then have a wonderfully decorated living room, with several dolls arranged as creatively as possible. (I remember one of our neighbors used to actually 'build' doll houses from cardboard sheets, paint them and create little doll cities, doll farms, doll hospitals etc). In our home, thanks to my mother's passion for miniature dolls of all kinds (porcelain, indian clay, metal, plastic etc) and creativity, we never fell short of materials or ideas. Oh and we also bought at least one new doll every year.

And then there would be visiting the homes of friends, either for 'Prasad' (consecrated food) or for Pooja or for sharing savories /sweets or just for fun. Though it seems silly to me now, I used to fidget so much when someone asked me to sing a song or chant a 'shloka'. It was probably the discomfort associated with adoloscence. As far as I could remember, that was the only displeasing factor about Dusshera to me. I so miss those days now. My mother still does all of the above and much more but I can no longer be home during the festival.

These days, the celebration of the demon-vanquishing part of Dusshera has begun to appeal to me more than ever before. As the legend goes, Mother Durga fought with the fiery demon for 9 whole days incesseantly, until she destroyed him for ever. To me, this signifies two things - the continuous human struggle with inner demonic qualities and the ultimate success (this is a popular metaphor) and the power of the female aspect in humans.

I feel that the whole legend of 'MahishasuraMardini' deals with both the above aspects. Even in everyday life, women are indeed much stronger than men. They show more determination, more resilience and more forbearance. Women can swallow not just their own failures but also of their men, much better and more readily than men can. That is probably why a woman can draw more from her huge reservoir of inner strength in the face of life's hardships. However, since God is known as the famous leveller, women also suffer from lack of unity. It is amazing how much they crave for attention and acceptance from the opposite sex than their own. It is sometimes disgusting to observe how much a woman can maliciously manipulate situations just so that another woman falls down in the eyes of some man. In short, a woman can be as sinister as she can be beautiful.

I am a woman myself and I understand the short comings of my kind. In spite of these hard truths about women, I am proud to be one because we can do things which no man usually can. (I said usually because there are also great men who transcend our definition of the usual man, who lived grand lives and died working for the upliftment of humanity). All the same, I am also ashamed that we tend to direct all our potential in gaining a 'certificate' from the men in our lives, instead of working towards enriching our self-esteems, instead of contributing positively to at least one person beyond our immediate families. I have no qualms in accepting that I am also afflicted with this general problem. So,  the coming of Dusshera is acting as a reminder of the true potential of feminine energy and how we can direct that energy to make the world a better place to live in, just as Mother Durga used all her strength and power not to prove to some other woman that she was greater/more beautiful than her or to win some man's 'human love' but to a greater purpose which was to relieve the earth of demonic qualities (as personified by Mahishasura).