We have two epoch-making events making the talk of the town. The Hornbill Festival and the Revival and Healing Festival. Both have acquired iconic status.
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Two Iconic Festivals
We have two epoch-making events making the talk of the town. The Hornbill Festival and the Revival and Healing Festival. Both have acquired iconic status. This year’s celebration of the Hornbill Festival has attracted an extraordinary crowd of foreign tourists, as well as visitors from Nagaland and the rest of India. Foreign tourists in general are delighted beyond measure. The rest are not less impressed. It has many new features like more government-partners, Indian and foreign, collaboration with MSMES, cultural proposals leading to business openings etc. Similarly, the Revival and Healing Festival seems to have attracted the biggest crowds in living memory, with healings and miracles seldom witnessed before.
Criticisms
Both have critics. Why spend so much money and resources on an event that benefits the few well-to do and well-connected, leaving the poor and unemployed as indigent as ever? Why so much eagerness to impress foreigners at huge expense when the conditions like the state of the roads, the corruption, unemployment, drug-addiction and HIV prevalence should draw the attention of the authorities? Similarly, the revival. Huge crowds and many healings and much sentiment do not promise change of life, repentance and reformation. There were other similar occasions though less crowded but arousing equal expectations with the decision to send missionaries. Grand resolutions and promises. But feelings evaporated into thin air after a week or so!
3. An Honest Look
Let us be honest. Nothing human is perfect. There will always be shortcomings and even undesirable consequences. But can we not see any positives? First the Hornbill: The enthusiasm of the spectators is already noted. There was promotion of business opportunities and employment. Let us look at the performers as well as the home crowd. Wasn’t there a greater display of self-control, ownership and self-possession and legitimate pride? Some of these are intangible benefits, but often more valuable.
Agni Missiles and Their Benefits
When India began to produce the Agni series of missiles capable of delivering warheads against enemies near and far, someone asked the mission director, our much-loved former president Abdul Kalam: Why are we, peaceful Indians, producing such instruments of war? He replied: We do not want to use them against anybody. But we want to regain our self-confidence and self-esteem. Being under the British for over two hundred years we had developed a sense of inferiority. On the other hand, when we are sure of our strength and capability, we don’t need to feel inferior to anybody. We can stand on our own.
Self-Esteem and Self-Respect
We were under nobody and inferior to nobody. Yet we all suffer from lack of self-esteem and self-confidence; some more, some less. Are not some signs of inferiority visible among us? Looking down upon some tribes or groups, unwillingness to do some types of jobs as if they are below our dignity, readiness to use violence at the drop of a hat etc.
When a people’s self-respect increases, nothing and nobody can make us feel inferior. Then we don’t see anybody as inferior, we despise nobody. We can do any work. No work is inferior; no work is second class! Our leaders don’t have to organise training programs, as some wise and far-seeing leaders did some years ago, to convince us that carrying loads, riding a rickshaw, selling newspapers, giving hair-cuts etc., to make money or earn a living are no less honourable than any other job. A few years back there was a leader in Shillong who encouraged the people to take up any and every job, including hair-cutting, carrying loads etc. He repeatedly told them unless doing these so-called low jobs becomes normal, they could not consider themselves civilized or modern. The way the waste-management was accomplished during the Hornbill Festival is clear indication of this intangible benefit.
God’s Reply to Our Desperate Cry
Now coming to the Healing and revival: It is true that not every big gathering leads to reformation. But this gathering in Dimapur was different as many participants felt. According to one, “what we witnessed in Dimapur is history in the making. The revival took place in an unfinished stadium, yet every single day it was completely filled”. And by public demand it was extended to a fourth day! Another: “As I left the festival grounds in Dimapur, watching families walk back…I felt something I rarely feel these days: hope for Nagaland’s future”. The faithful came with real hunger for God’s intervention. There seems to have been a feeling of hopelessness considering the mess we are in… the corruption, unemployment, tribalism, the selling of votes, drug-addiction etc. Every human effort at improvement seems to have failed. So, among many thinking citizens, there seems to have been a desperate search for a way out. This convention seems to have been an answer to this cry. Even non-church-going members found a sense of earnestness and sincerity that was unusual. Such a frame of mind certainly will not stop within the walls of the stadium. Change will certainly take place, incremental changes, individuals, making changes in behaviour in the office, in the market place, in families, in party forums, in fulfilling one’s duties at home or in the work place, in the use of government funds etc., If among the more than 100,000 people that came to the gathering, at least one third begin this change, it will surely spread.
Our Task
Meanwhile, let us support this awakening with some change in our own lives, with our prayer and encouragement. There are so many making efforts to bring in change: the Forum for Reconciliation, Peace Chanel, mass media productions like “Dreamz Unlimited”, the print media campaigns etc. Let us revive that clean election campaign and persuade ourselves and our politicians to make a difference. Let us do our best and God will do the rest.
Fr. M.P. Thomas SDB,
Bosco B.Ed College.