Celebrate commerce along with the festival
Published by Yazad Jal November 20th, 2004 in Economics, Culture and SocietyParth at Spontaneous Order has a pithy post on people who moan about “commercialisation” of festivals.
Commerce was always part of festivals–did all Indians, say 50/100 years ago, make their own fire crakers or Ganesh idols? No, they bought them. So what we see today is not a new phenomenon of commercialisation but simply the old phenomenon on a larger scale. It’s escalation! Not commercialisation!A lot more people are able to participate in the festivities and are able to spend more than people did in the past. Isn’t this what we call prosperity?
Amazingly, the same people who cry hoarse over commercialisation and consumerism also howl about increasing poverty after liberalisation. What gives? A is A, isn’t it? Or is prosperity poverty? Now we are in Chomsky land!
Spontaneous Order has interesting posts and now they’re posting quite regularly. Give it a dekho. (Although I do wish they’d change the design. Grey is so drab and the font size too small.)
wish granted yazad. we have changed our design.