With Navratri begins a festive cycle of fasting, feasting and celebrating that culminates in the noise and fervour of Deepawali. The weather turns towards winter, the sun’s harshness softens, and post-monsoon diseases hopefully disappear. Another annual cycle arises, comes to fullness, and falls away. Even as we continue to struggle with ourselves, our environment, our gods, our beliefs, our faltering hopes and unfulfilled dreams. Do our daily encounters with the brutishness inherent in the business of living inure us to failures, heartbreaks and disappointments? Do we become acclimatised, less susceptible to injury from hard knocks? And is a thicker skin a good thing because it protects us, even if it might mean a lesser degree of empathy with the other? Is it better to be encased behind bulletproof glass, safe, but also removed from the vibrant dynamism of life?
I wonder if, for believers, festivals such as Navratri might be as much about a renewal as it is about observing prescri-bed rituals. Stepping out of routine bre-aks the regularity of daily life, and focusing on the divine might help access a kind of consciousness that one is normally not in tune with. What might appear to be inherent in something outside — in an external presence, form or idol — is actually within. There is no divinity outside that does not exist within. As is mentioned in the Yajurveda, Yatha pinde tatha brahmande, yatha brahmande tatha pinde — as is the individual, so is the universe; as is the universe, so is the individual. It can also be interpreted as — as within, so without; as without, so within. In this, a sacred truth is revealed — everything external, whether it is the world, the cosmos, or an external divinity, is reflected within. In fact, the only way to access what is out there is from within. Our senses help us make sense of the physical world. Our minds and intellect bring to us the knowledge of ideas, how things work, how to navigate circumstances. Our hearts brings us knowledge of emotions, relationships, empathy and compassion.
