Pongal, Lohri and Makar Sankranti: know your festivals!
Pongal, Lohri and Makar Sankranti are very prime festivals and their importance has often been belittled, primarily due to the fact that it does not really appeal to all phases of the society in Modern India. The primary backdrop behind all the three is the same premise: celebration of flourish and reap of new crops. It is the call for prosperity in totality; and the preventive and animated banishment of evil forces against the sabotaging of ill reap of crops.
Hence as we see, it is mainly a farmer's fest and this explains the very reason for the undermined popularity. But, the festival is still going strong in vernacular and cultural pockets of India, like Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, rather the entire South India, by the name of PONGAL; in Maharashtra by the name of Makar Sankranti and by the name of Lohri in Punjab.
The mythological belief appends the wide belief system prevailing in Indian Culture about the triumph of goodness over evil, along with the prayer of prosperity. In Pongal, newly reaped rice, freshly plucked sugarcane juice, or for that matter jaggery, and milk are boiled in a freshly baked earthen pot put on an open oven, till the boiling mixture overflows consuming with itself the fire underneath the pot. The significance is that, we pray for a prosperous year ahead (indicated by the overflowing of Pongal).
The Punjabi folk believe in celebrating the good reap of the season as this time of the year is the actual time for reaping the wheat grains as they ripen due to the Westerlies rains they receive. In their event, they gather all the dry sticks and leaves which are found in or around the fields during reaping and during the evening, celebrations start with making a burning pyre of the collected leaves and sticks, and prancing and dancing (Bhangra) their way around it in celebration and to the beat of their folk songs. The idea is that the dry sticks are the ill forces which were around the fields affected by the attempts of evil to destroy the crops; hence burning them is like burning the achievements of evil, however mellow they may have been.
Questions and Answers
Makar Sankranti is the day when the sun enters into the zodiac Capricorn or Makara that showcase the arrival of spring season. Makar Sankranti is also known as Khichadi or Til Sakranti in north India where the combination of rice and cereals are distributed among the poor.
Lohri is fundamentally an agricultural festival, filled with merry-making. It is celebrated in the state of Punjab on the on the 13th of January, which falls one day before Makar Sankranti. While Lohri is essentially a Punjab festival, it is celebrated in some other states of North India as well. In cities like Delhi, which have a predominant Punjbai population, Lohri is celebrated to denote the last of the coldest days of winter. The Punjab and other areas of North India get very cold in the mo
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