We live in an era of whatsapp straight forwards. During festival days, this skyrockets, especially a swarm of some nicely designed poster greetings with very insightful messages given in attractive fonts, which possibly was drafted and designed by some AI App; and I end up reacting to many of such forwards either with an emoji (that never represents my true feeling to the greeting) or maintain a stoic silence.

Worse still is a case in point – In one of my friend’s group, there were flurry of “Happy Muharram” messages on the muharram day addressed to couple of our muslim friends, and they were responding to these messages with a “namaste” emoji; until one of the group member ponted out that Muharram is a day of mourning, and is not a day for happy wishes (like that of Good Friday); and some chats happened around that; and guess what, in the middle of these chats, another friend in the group sends a “Happy Muharram” message :-).

Such is the state of our awareness in the current times, where the actions are far removed from deep human feelings, and we continue to engage with the people and world around with shallow content, without any connection to human feelings.

What does it mean to send a message “Happy <festival name>” to most people in my chat. We have got so used to sending and receiving such a message, it is just a social custom that I am merely complying with, else there is “FOMO”.

All festivals that we celebrate have religious, cultural and geographic significance. Even though they have some historic event (eg, independence day, rAma navami, Good Friday/ Easter Sunday, Muharram etc) or climate related connection (eg, navarAtri, makara sankrAnti, pongal etc) or celebration of a significant work (vEda upAkarma, gItA jayanti), it does have a significance to my life in the current day context. I can connect and reflect on the significance of a given festival; and connect and have meaningful exchanges with relevant people around – quantity doesn’t matter, but the quallity of engagements is the marker of how well I truly celebrate.

Every festival is not a mere holiday for long vacation, nor are they for unmindful straight forwards and status updates of greeting posters; neither are they for doing unmindful pUjA/ rituals. We have a possibility to make them more meaningful for ourselves and the people around. All it requires is some practice of bringing in awareness to my actions – practicing two simple questions – (1) What am I really doing? (2) How can I engage with this practice of Festival Greetings to make this meaningful for myself and others in my context?