PVK talk on A I R on Onam 2023
‘Onam, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow’
Sometimes the joy in us must be expressed. Not in some private moment of serenity and peace, but in the company of family, friends, neighbours and even strangers. We feel grateful for all the wonderful things the world has to offer; sunshine and rain, blue skies and greenery, the sound of music and the rhythms of dance and, above all, the pleasure of a full stomach The joy, in short, of just being alive. Or, as the famous phrase has it, celebrating life.
One will not find a people who do not experience this joy or a culture that does not express it in a festival. Sometimes, these are spring festivals. Often the collective joy reveals itself in the form of a harvest festival. In Kerala the best time is when our world-famous monsoon has departed after drenching the land in life-giving water and leaving it in a thousand shades of green. This is an experience guaranteed to touch even the professional kill-joy’s heart. So, in the Indian season of ‘ritu’ of Varsham, we have Onam, our own harvest festival, embraced by all who live in this land or even visit it.
Onam is about sharing, camaraderie and merry-making or, to use a phrase youngsters may understand better, partying. Differences are forgotten, pain and hurt erased as feelings of wonder and benignity take over our lives. As revelry and jubilation fill our lives, we imagine that this was how life was like in the past and we dare hope that this is how life will always be in the future.
The pleasures of a full stomach are great, but those of filling that stomach are greater. No wonder so much of Onam is about eating, the greatest of pleasures. The Onam sadya, once the centre of our Onam celebration, has now been taken to all parts of the world by that modern marvel – the globalised Malayali. Rice, parippu, pappadam and payasam and the innumerable mouth-watering additions to the Onam lunch that tradition and innovation have provided, can now be enjoyed not just around the world but around the year. Life has been Onamised.
Europeans, I said earlier, had four seasons. Now they have two seasons not part of the traditional calendar. They are the seasons of fire and of flood. There is no fixed time for them. People don’t celebrate either. These are seasons of extreme weather when even the mood of the most enthusiastic pleasure-seeker is dampened or scorched by real distress.
This creeping change is affecting Kerala too. Onam has adapted. Onam is no longer a family or joint-family affair. One of boisterous kids playing games and being fed endless tasty snacks with a menu dependent on locally available food and created to endure in the non-refrigerated world of the past. Today the shopping mall or the online merchant provides god’s own plenty; delivered to your doorstep. We can top the sadya with a French or a Japanese or an Italian delicacy. The mysterious forces of the market will satisfy every appetite one has for food or for entertainment.
The agricultural world that was celebrated in legend and festivals no longer exists, at least not in Kerala. The boys and girls who sang while harvesting and threshing now appear, and in future will only appear, in theatre or on electronic screens. In letting go of traditional agriculture, have we, in Kerala, also abandoned agriculture altogether? Except, perhaps, in the form of shrubs to beautify our yards and potted plants to decorate our air conditioned rooms?
What will Onam be a generation or two from now? Will the sadya be delivered by a drone and served by a robot in mundu and neritathu, one that will understand commands in Malayalam? (“Mole Robotica, a little more sambar, please. On the leaf, Robotica, not my mundu!”) Will our plantain leaves be airlifted, using electric vehicles, from the green fields of Siberia or the Antartic? Will we be living in tower blocks that grow food while protecting us from the heat and humidity of a post-industrial world? Will the Arabian Sea be lapping at the base of our foothills? Will our state be narrower than today? Will our present beaches have disappeared? Or will massive feats of engineering keep the oceans at bay? Will Kerala be green, as lawns are green, or brown as mud, or gray, the colour of cement and concrete?
Maybe my imagination is too limited and I cannot foresee how technology and natural forces will transform Kerala in another fifty years.
To find an answer to these questions, perhaps we should focus not just on eating but also on chewing the cud. That is, ruminating, thinking and meditating. We must listen to the science and to the scientists. A bewildering array of specialists and super specialists are collecting data, observing and analysing, testing and publishing papers. From the microbiologists who understand the role of, yes, microbes to cosmologists who can link stuff happening elsewhere in the solar system with events on earth; from data crunchers who study major systems like planetary weather or dynamic meteorologists and glaciologists and… I could go on and on. The subdivisions of just climate science are bewilderingly big, too big to be enumerated here and now.
One moment. Am I mad? Why am I even thinking of this? I should be thinking of being a good host to Maveli, not about what geophysicists and climatologists are doing. This is Onam, the season of festivals and celebration. Who wants to follow science and scientific papers? I must eat, shop, sing, play, dance and be merry in every possible way. We must share the good things of life that we have and be grateful that we have enough to share. We must participate in all celebrations, share our happiness and spread joy. I am sure my grandchildren will join in. Let us mould them in our beatified shapes and near-hallowed ways.
We must celebrate Onam. To not celebrate Onam would be like turning our backs on life. It would be like rejecting hope. We must never do that. Let us not be cynical or pessimistic. That is not what Onam is about. Onam is a promise we make to ourselves. That the future will be as bright as the imagined past was idyllic. Every promise is a flower that will bloom in the future. Let us create a bright future for Kerala and India. So, let us be positive and celebrate this Onam with gusto. Happy Onam.
P. Vijaya Kumar
profpvk@gmail.com
02/05/2026
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