{"id":1947,"date":"2020-11-21T08:03:05","date_gmt":"2020-11-21T02:18:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/himalini.com\/en\/?p=1947"},"modified":"2020-11-21T08:07:06","modified_gmt":"2020-11-21T02:22:06","slug":"when-chhath-puja-celebrates-the-quintessence-of-creation-as-no-religion-on-earth-does","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/himalini.com\/en\/when-chhath-puja-celebrates-the-quintessence-of-creation-as-no-religion-on-earth-does.html","title":{"rendered":"When Chhath Puja celebrates the quintessence of Creation as no religion on earth does."},"content":{"rendered":"

Vivekanand Jha, Ranchi.\u00a0 One of the conundrums of my life, since the time I evolved myself as writer and thinker, has been to dissect the quintessence of the values and importance of offering oblation to the setting sun on the preceding evening and then welcoming the next dawn with a reverential salutation. In other words, it is the festivity where Sun is the primordial God of worship. Needless to say that, even before the mankind had invented God, it was Sun, the life giver and its sustainer, assumed invariably an exalted position of being the Surya Narayan. No wonder the western intellectuals who witnessed millions of people bowing to the sunset and then spontaneously offering salutations to the rising sun, on the very next dawn, felt bemused by this absurdity, especially when the nation was subjugated by the colonisation. They pitied upon the superstitious mass of people whose level of intelligence they overwhelmingly scoffed. Alas, they felt, that instead of this collective energy being focussed for individual salvation, if the mass consciousness could have been awakened towards seeking freedom, the oriental civilisation could have successfully redeemed itself!<\/p>\n

The superimposition of Macaulay’s Machiavellian attempts to educate the orientals in their language and philosophy, did take a heavy toll on India’s innate intellectuality where, the new intelligentsia class, educated as they were in British model of education, looked upon their own cultural civilisation as nothing short of feudalistic, steeped in obscurantism. Such was the re-orientation of the neo-liberal class of intelligentsia that, far from being proud of their own moorings, they reveled in occidental aspects and orientation of leading their lives. No wonder the hitherto held sacred the original scriptural knowledge of Vedas and Upanishads as the summum bonum of the orientals, began being looked upon with a sense of condescension, if not with the profusion of contempt. The new religion of Christianity became an object of admiration, with the notion gaining ascendancy that while Christianity represented modernity and sophistry, Hinduism with its multitudinous godheads held little charm for a new intelligentsia class.But then arose, in such situations of despondency and disillusionment, a monk in the ochre robe who challenged the western superficialities in their own citadel, while successfully re-establishing the age-old values of Sanatan Dharma, its derivative Hinduism. No wonder, Swami Vivekananda, while speaking before the American intelligentsia, in the World Parliament of Religions, way back in 18930, in Chicago, had irrefutably established that Vedas and Upanishads represent the ultimate truth. Quoting from Rig Vedas, he said, ‘ Ekang Sad-vipra bahuda vadanti'(As all the rivers lead to the sea, all the religions lead to the same God).<\/p>\n

The hitherto little known, if not incognito, monk had become the brand ambassador of oriental supremacy over that of much vaunted occidental heritage. Much later, Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister, while paying glowing tributes to Oriental family values, had commendably said, ‘ When it comes to the family values, we invariably look up to India, because she alone teaches us the family values. While the sophisticated westerners throw their old parents to the old-age homes. Even, such a powerful Prime Minister like Margaret Thatcher, had to lead a life of solitude, spending her evenings of life in the company of a nanny. The bitter truth of the purported glory of Westerners is this: All that is old, becomes the cancelled cheque and, therefore, needed to be rejected, thrown out. In contrast, the values that Indian society so robustly inculcates, comes all the way from its age old celebration of Chhat Puja which taught the society, since the time immemorial that, those from whose lives sunshine had faded, needed to be feted, worshipped, not isolated or condescendingly bundled into the old-age homes. In fact, the great Chhat festival teaches the mankind to welcome the new dawn with the same level of enthusiasm as the preceding sunset is to be seen off with the corresponding level of worshipful reverence. Hence, it is the significance of the great Chhat festival which teaches the eternity of Sanatan values which will never fade. In fact, the truth is this: The eternity of Hinduism is rooted in the worship of sun, both its rise as well as its eclipse. No wonder no festival teaches the mankind the relevance of Creation as Chhat Puja does: How sunrise is synonymous with the birth of species on earth whereas the sunset is the passing away of species into the state of nothingness. Both the phenomena is an integral part of the Creation.<\/p>\n

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Chhat Puja celebrated in Kathmandu today’s photo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Vivekanand Jha is an author of Yes, I am Bihari and The Living Legends of Mithila. He is an author and a Public Intellectual.<\/p>\n

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Chhat Puja celebrated in Bhakhrain, Madhubani district, Bihar.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vivekanand Jha, Ranchi.\u00a0 One of the conundrums of my life, since the time I evolved myself as writer and thinker, has been to dissect the quintessence of the values and importance of offering oblation to the setting sun on the preceding evening and then welcoming the next dawn with a reverential salutation. In other words, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1954,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[17,13,1,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-india","category-nepal","category-sports","category-top-stories-of-madhesh"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/himalini.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/20201121_070151-scaled.jpg?fit=1181%2C2560&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paS11m-vp","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/himalini.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/himalini.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/himalini.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/himalini.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/himalini.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/himalini.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1947\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/himalini.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1954"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/himalini.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/himalini.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/himalini.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}