Celebration Junks

Recently I had an opportunity to attend a lavish marriage celebration of kin of my close friend. While returning late in the night I had to go behind the pandal area where my car was parked. The scene behind the pandals was horrible. Piles of junk of food material and many other party stuffs were lying everywhere. Music was still playing quite loud, but foul smell of this junk had also started polluting the environment. I remember, I had seen similar sort of wastages in many other celebrations too. Somehow, in the recent past the “Celebration Junks” are on a steep rise. This pinches me a lot. I do not know if as an individual, I can really take any concrete action to curb this menace, but I do feel the guilt. My guilt is getting converted into this form. Most marriage functions and other similar celebrations are now catered by professional agencies. The problem is not really catering, but it is about use of excess material, which is prepared in the name of service quality. Later a big chunk of this material is actually wasted. Many times the excess food, which could have been distributed to the needy people in time, is just thrown in sewers. 

We do have a guest control law in our country, but who cares. I am sure, most of the people have not even heard of it. The expenses on marriages and other celebrations are rising. People print expensive invitation cards, which are of just one time brief use. There are lots of expensive gifts, which are received in a marriage ceremony, that are never used in their lifetime. Our culture is exploding with extremes of copycat nature of people. The control is really not there. Individually everyone seems to be upright, but as a person in a society he becomes a moron and acts mindlessly. People are even seen taking loans to execute their show-off plans. I know many people do all this to seek happiness. There is a phase in life, when most of us strongly believe that money power can bring all sorts of happiness. In fact, in the same phase I have also seen peak levels of stress amongst the same set of people. Whatever I am writing seems to be a very generic and common perception or a kind of universal truth, but we do need to act and change something at least to stop such a mad addition to junkyards and sewer lines due our poor actions. If we do not act now, the Chennai kind of floods may be waiting in for us in all cities for the simple reason of choked drains, whether we create it out of our daily habits or due to lavish celebrations we do in the name of acquiring happiness. 

Dr. Sunil Ji Garg