-Harking Back: If you love Basant, every year fly out to Orange County

Last Saturday (yesterday) this newspaper carried two stories next to one another. One that the Ravi Riverside project had been inaugurated by the once kite-flying Prime Minister, and, secondly, that the IG Police was very concerned by the five years of below par performance of the Punjab Police.

Both stories were not surprising. The same IG Police last Wednesday warned kite-flyers in Lahore would be dealt a firm hand and locked up for up to five years. I write this column not out of spite, but because yesterday a gentleman from Lahore now living in the USA has purchased a few hundred acres of land in Lahore, not our Lahore but the other one in the USA’s Orange County, Virginia, and on the second Saturday of February, 2021, will be holding a massive ‘Basant Mela’ on his lands. He claims already over 35,000 people have booked a place. Gosh, we really love to wipe our city’s past as others pick up our best and move on. You just cannot kill off Basant from the minds of Lahorites.

So let me dwell on Basant and the below-par police. The second Sunday of February falls on the full moon quarter of the Punjabi traditional month of Maagh. That is the real calendar people living in villages follow. It represents nature. On this day the yellow flowers of the mustard fields stand out. It is time to celebrate the bounties of life and its creation. It is Basant.

This has been our way for thousands of years. All over the world people celebrate the arrival of the spring season. The reason being that humans have survived primarily because their lives depend on crop yields, not to forget animal life cycles.

In Japan their Spring Festival falls in mid-April, in Canada in May, in Bulgaria the middle of March, in Thailand it’s in April, in Spain it begins on the first of March for two weeks and five days. In Chile, South America, it varies on the first and second Saturdays of March. In Poland they make dolls from leftover straw and dump them in the river, remnants of the cold floating away.

In Lahore various religions over thousands of years have crafted this festival to mesh into prevailing beliefs. This is a festival not based on belief, but the fact that better days await. Never has any civilisation killed off the very idea of being happy. But then they had not calculated the pious in the State of Pakistan.

The Buddhists and the Jains of the Punjab prayed before the first cut of the crop. The Jains distributed the first cuttings before sunrise to the poor. The Buddhists followed likewise. The Hindu religion, which followed, used their deity of knowledge, music, wisdom and nature starting off by making all children learning the alphabet. Their deity Saraswati was first mentioned in the Rigveda, written in the Vedic period in what is today the land of Pakistan, more so the Punjab. The fact is that today a new relatively new religion rules Pakistan.

I write this not to upset our pious lot, who get upset very quickly, but to remind that festivals and happiness are invariably meshed up with beliefs. Humans like to rationalise happiness. It gives a meaning to festivity, a meaning that is based primarily on the soil and, secondarily, to prevailing belief systems. In the spread of Islam we see that whenever violent invaders appeared on the scene, the invader’s religion ceased to spread. In times of peace, thanks to Sufi saints, Islam spread fast. So peace and happiness are critical.

Amazingly, among the many Sufi saints Nizamuddin Aulia went out of his way to participate in Basant and kite-flying and gave it a spiritual explanation. We also know that the poet Amir Khusrau was deeply influenced by the yellow flowers carried by women on this occasion and followed by kite-flying. He even composed classical ‘ragas’ based on this festival. ‘Raga Basant’ is just one of his splendid creations. Even Shah Hussain and Bulleh Shah followed this tradition. Surely we cannot cut their ideas out of our lives.

This tradition of Basant exists deeply in the hearts and minds of the people of our land, even though government attempts to let the festival prosper as a major tourist attraction have badly failed because our rulers are mortally scared of ignorant priests, who also scare bureaucracy to shoo happiness away.

Let us get to the core of the real reason for disallowing Basant in Lahore. For starters it is a totally urban problem and is completely divorced from the ethos of our diminishing rural landscape. The reason for the ban are the deaths because of kite string. My assertion is that this is a totally false claim.

If you research all the deaths from kite-string you will notice that all of them have been youngsters on motorcycles. Almost all the unfortunate victims were underage youngsters speeding without the legally required helmets. So, what is it about youngsters on motorcycles only? Why them alone.

With our government failing to provide the people of this city of 12 million plus, the world’s eighth largest, with public transport, what do people do? The distances between any two points have become immense as the city expands horizontally. So bicycles will not do and not everyone can afford a car. So motorcycles are the only answer.

Today Lahore has the world’s largest motorcycle population, almost two for every household of seven. It is an astonishing statistic to say the least. That comes to over 4.3 million in 2017 as the police statistics tell us on the website. If you happen to walk through the old walled city you will notice that walking comfortably is impossible as motorcycles virtually attack you from every direction.

Now comes the question: “Have non-motorcyclists had any problem with kite string?” The answer as a police researcher informs me is that the chances are almost zero. Yes, maybe one victim every three years. This is less than the people who die in tomato fights or bull runs in Spain every year. Why punish the people of Lahore for police failings.

Let us concentrate on the myth of chemical string. Some claim it is polyethylene string, which is a rare occurrence, as this is considered cheating in this magnificent sport. Now about normal cotton string coated with ‘manja’ (grounded glass with a coloured paste) which is the norm. This is what should be discussed.

Experiments carried out – imagine by the police themselves - using uncoated white cotton string gave the same results. So the trouble really is that at a very high speed any string, heaven forbid if it is a silk thread, will prove dangerous. So what is the solution?

After studying this purely urban problem based on a massive motorcycle population, there is only one, and only one solution. That is for this festival to be allowed from sunrise to sunset only on Basant day, preferably a Sunday, and restrict the festival to the old walled city of Lahore only.

In this time period all non-food shops should remain closed and the people of the old city should not use motorcycles. The outer Circular Road can at best be a 20 km/h road. In such a situation the chances of a fatality from kite-string is almost zero. This is the only way out.