Chasing Purchase:An Onam Experience

Over decades, Onam has got the status of the celebration of Malayalis. Forget the crude (subtle) hierarchies in the society for the time being. You are welcome to have a glass of payasam from my home. You can also prepare the so called elite recipes at your kitchen. (Please, don’t buy red meat and avoid eating biriyani. Only vegetables, fruits, curd, butter milk etc will make you feel good.)
Onam is essentially a festival with an agrarian hang over. It thrives on the memories of a bygone feudal era. Its spirit lies in living one’s life with sowing reaping. So how can we celebrate Onam now? Now a days are we planting even a single sapling?
Now, Onam is nothing but great grand shopping festival.It has reduced its charm to purchase coupons and offers. It is all about two take three free.So it would be ideal if malayalis could get together in shopping malls and streets to celebrate the Onam of these days. Instead of making ten course lunches, they can surf through offers and de-stress themselves by accumulating piles of clothes and kitchen utensils.
Being a person who lived abroad for sometime, I can tell with clarity describe with coherence that Onam is being celebrated in its right spirit in far away places where Malayalis fled in search of prosperity. Malayali Diaspora took their celebrations along with them. I have seen people struggling to get a plantain leaf to serve hot rice on the auspicious day of Thiruvonam. Keeping the memoirs of their homeland in their minds, they would always look for a chance to come back to Kerala. They forget( it is habitual) what exactly happening at their home land and return only to see people running to shops to purchase Onam!