Friday | 10 January 2025 | Reg No- 06
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Friday | 10 January 2025 | Epaper

Beware of fireworks on the eve of new year 

Published : Tuesday, 31 December, 2024 at 12:00 AM  Count : 323
Mohammad Mahfuzul Islam
Another year is about to become part of the archive. Some boisterous people love to use firecrackers and fireworks to welcome the new year. Years go by one after another, yet people feel excited about the new one. Tree rings accumulate, and wrinkles become part of the body. People want to forget the tension, anxiety, and worries. They peep inside the bioscope to travel to imaginary places. While forgetting their sorrows and miseries they disturb the harmony of the environment by producing noise. 

Days and times are counted to keep track of events, plans, and memories. Our lives are occupied with many incidents and mundane activities. We use different calendars based on our identities. The Arabic lunar calendar is used for Muslim religious celebrations. Eid ul fitr, Eid-ul-azha, Ashura, shab-e-barat, and shab-e-qadr are such occasions. In urban areas, the Bengali calendar is used for ceremonies like pohela falgun, and pohela boishakh. Apart from them, urbanites can rarely name a Bengali month and a particular day without looking it up on Google. Rural people on the other hand, still depend on the Bengali calendar for agriculture and daily activities. 

Some humans, through their actions, hold funerals for other animals. The New Year's celebration is one such transgression. Commercial enterprises enslave us in calendrical incarceration. Out of pessimism, we have a new dawn and a new calendar. We have to learn to endure the hectic schedule foisted on us. We have developed the habit of venerating the calendar that engulfs us. We become jovial,forgetting that the new cycle will bring us more burdens. Optimism is supposed to be summoned to ensure our survival. We have to rise from the ashes to celebrate our inseparable imprisonment. 

Firecrackers and fireworks unleash cruelty on all living beings. When firecrackers explode at the same time they create a huge burden on our eardrums. In our search for beauty in fireworks, we have lost the fireflies. While making chandeliers in the sky we erase the beauty of stars.Sleeping birds succumb to death because of additional sound pollution on the eve of New Year. Humans stampede the lives of other animals and make their desire the ruling policy of the world. By doing so they forget that nature remembers every act of injustice that comes back as retribution. 

The elixir of immortality gave gunpowder a new lease of life. The unintended outcome found new applications. Experimentation is crucial for such an introduction. Humans combine one chemical with another and find something to extend the boundary of knowledge. When shall we learn that the lockdown era can make a grand comeback in the future? Our respect for nature and its rules are back to square one. The incorrigible desire to control the flow has become a part of recurrent blunders. The mere change of feathers will not do. We need to arrest this brakeless vehicle. 

Those who die alone at home know the price of affluence or the rat race. Our helplessness cannot be erased by following the king's advice. We are told not to think about a way out of this conundrum, and to swim in the deceiving pool forgetting our indebtedness. We must think about the thoughts prepared for us in the showcase. No one questions the present stalemate we are experiencing incessantly. A calendar is the record of our bondage and unfreedom. The graveyard of our free will is ubiquitous. 

Migration violates our dreams of togetherness as our aspirations take us to unknown terrains. We dream of earning in foreign currencies. Challenging routes await our materialization of ambitions. The tug-of-war between different metropolitan centres takes control of our preferences. Video calls keep our reunions alive in another form. Face-to-face interactions find their lifeline in memories. The reminiscences exude an air of lost connections. The desire to return to the place of formative days clashes with the option of better bread and butter. 

Our lack of understanding makes the existence of other living beings difficult. We know only to promulgate a false win-win situation. Profiteering activities rule the biographies. Liars are plundering the entire ecosystem to expand the empire of environmental terrorism. Because awareness has gone downhill that proves our depleted cognition and firecrackers and fireworks become part of crippled celebrations. 

The writer is a faculty member of the Anthropology Programme at Independent University Bangladesh



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