An open letter

I haven't had time to update my blog recently.

But I've been sharing my thoiughts elsewhere.

Here's something I wrote for a website called Bihardays:

Open Letter

Kolabau: Banana symbol

The banana leaf is regarded as auspicious throughout the South Asia: guests of honour are traditionally served on banana leaves from Bengal to Bangkok and beyond.

This puja, be sure to try out one of those delicately cooked flavoursome cooked-in-a banana leaf delicacies. Being a carnivore, this may sound a bit heretical to all you dear ‘proper Bengalee’ friends, but I can’t resist it: Why can’t we serve the whole range of wonderful fish and meat dishes cooked-in-banana leaf on all nine days of the Pooja?

Getting back to the base topic, One of the most interesting things about the Poojo Rituals is dressing up a young, slender, lissom banana plant in a white sari with a red border early on Saptami morning. At dawn, just as the first light of the sun peeps sleepily through whatever remaining foliage is left on the planet, the intrepid bongs and their priests are already performing the Kolabau or Kola Bou rituals. ‘Pran Prathishta’, or life, is breathed into this symbolic banana plant wrapped in the saree, an image of the Goddess Durga. The ritual is performed on the Ghats of a river or the edge of a pond. At the water’s edge, instead life is symbolically transferred from water to the plantain tree.

This is really beautiful, because even the most sceptic atheist will agree that scientifically, it is believed that all life started from water.

The Kolabau ritual is an elaborate one, and quite complicated. Sometimes special priests are imported all the way from specific villages in Bengal to ensure that the rituial is perfectly performed, because, one friend told me, Durga is a very liberated goddess, and you don’t fool around with her. You’re very careful not to get a lady on a lion with eight arms holding sharp instruments in a pique! The stem of the banana tree is draped in a new red and white saree and the leaves are left uncovered. The ‘kolabau’ is brought back in a procession, with solemnity and pomp. It is placed near Lord Ganesha in the Durga Puja Pandal, to the beat of traditional drums.