Living: Durga Puja; Victory Parade

Religious fervour takes the backseat in Calcutta this year as organisers light up pandals with innovative icons of Goddess Durga.

The Indian tricolour flutters proudly at the hilltop military outpost. Halfway down the hill, a tank menacingly surveys the scene below: armed soldiers, army vehicles and a forlorn memorial, obviously to the jawans who have sacrificed their lives for the nation. And the noise: the staccato drumbeats, the screams, the screeching tannoys. You would be lulled into thinking this was a war zone somewhere in the eastern sector. But then there are the flowers and the heady fragrance of incense. And, of course, Goddess Durga regally ensconced within the pandal. A battlefield as the seat of a goddess? It's only Calcutta celebrating Durga Puja.

As the city revels over Durga's homecoming once more, there is no reining in the imagination. The 1,300-odd puja committees are faced with competition and the winning strategy calls for a pandal that stands out unmistakably. Even if it means giving short shrift to tradition and conventions. No problem. "Religious fervour has taken the backseat," observes litterateur Ananda Shankar Ray. "The puja organisers are chasing novelty." The lights, the chants and the fervour remain, but the emphasis has shifted to glitz and glamour; the objective obviously is to startle the devout. So, as thousands of visitors throng the puja venue at Ekdalia Park, Godzilla suddenly comes alive in lights and gobbles a car.

Godzilla, the Titanic, Ronaldo. Only the best and the biggest will do. "The pujas are no longer just a religious occasion," explains Pradeep Ghosh, president of the puja committee which thought up the battlefield at Santosh Mitra Square, "it's more of an event." That is why when a huge ship, the

Titanic no less, suddenly docked at the FD Block in Salt Lake, there were no double takes. It is the puja season and there can be no surprises.

Not even when the infamous face of Monica Lewinsky is reportedly superimposed on Durga's at a pandal a few kilometres outside Calcutta. The sacrilege finds festive acquiescence. "Good or bad, anything new is welcome," says Pathik Gupta, an intrepid puja organiser, good humouredly. Therefore, instead of edifying spectacles from the scriptures, there is in the illuminations the sensational story of the recent child swap in a city government hospital. Bad news is apparently good news for the puja planners. Last year, Santosh Mitra Square had pulled the rug from under other pandals with its unusual theme. The pandal resembled a train accident, with blood-smeared bogies and bodies.

Clearly, success is spelt as "innovation". A bit of imagination, a bit of artistic licence, and one could end up with a pandal that will attract the biggest turnout. Take the people of Behala, for instance. Immensely displeased with soccer star Ronaldo's performance in the World Cup, they have devised their own way to punish the Brazilian: he stands in place of the demon Asura in the puja pantheon. At the same time, this is the right time to applaud a few heroes too. At Amherst Street, Prime Minister Atal Bihar Vajpayee is up in the lights with his euphoric post-Pokhran slogan, "Jai jawan, jai kisan, jai vigyan." The people of Beliaghata can be forgiven for being less imaginative; they only have perennial favourites Saurav Ganguly and Sachin Tendulkar untiringly playing to the gallery.

Not many mind that these images are not quite in consonance with the solemnity of celebrating the victory of good over evil. But if a troubled conscience should suffer some worshippers to seek divine peace, there are a few pandals which are more sober, if equally ostentatious. There are, for instance, the intricate replica of the Meenakshi Temple at Chalta Bagan, the Ajanta-Ellora caves at Mohammed Ali Park and the uncharacteristically under-illuminated rural Bengal tableau at Nabapalli. Similarly, Rabindranath Tagore's sylvan paradise, Santiniketan, has come up at Padmapukur. More starkly, the puja pandal at Tollygunge has no deity, no lights, just a ghat (ritualistic pot). "It is to show our solidarity with the plight of the flood victims," says an organiser. But if being different is the norm, the pandal near the Bhawani cinema hall hasn't done too badly. It is constructed from saris which will be donated to the flood victims after the festival. The pandal may not measure up to the expectations of the Bengali aesthete but nevertheless it has people talking about it.

The festive madness has not spared the traditional purohits (priests who officiate at the pujas) either. A few days before the pujas began, the Paschim Banga Vaidic Academy organised a 10-day refresher course for puja rites, mantras and rituals, and the purohits went through the workshop over umpteen cups of hot tea with a businesslike approach. Calcuttans were definitely impressed with the changing ways of their religious leaders.

The biggest turn, however, was that Goddess Durga breached the traditional three-world cosmology to enter cyberworld. Sitting before the computer screen far from the madding crowds at the noisy pandals in the metro may not be in true festival spirit but one has to move with the times. Presumably, the pujas will no longer be the same again.

SCREEN GODDESS

With more and more homes in Calcutta hooked to the Internet, Goddess Durga was gloriously online this year. Compared to only one software company last year, there were at least five this time setting up websites for exhaustive coverage of the festival at home and abroad. Cyber worship looked promising with 20,000 visitors expected every day and a projected 20 lakh hits during the frolicking four days of the festival. "Mythology has finally blended with technology," says Venkat Subbarao, chief executive officer of Computer Associates TCG Software Private Ltd.