Live life in festivity
Festivity is in the air of Bangladesh. We celebrate heritage, culture and traditions through festivals. Festivals weave stories, values and customs connected to them. Festivals manage to bring people physically and emotionally together and add a lot of colour and interest to life. Every festival has a symbolism and the entire proceedings are centered around themes. In our part of the world, activities around festivals play an important role to build structure to our social lives, and connect us with our families and backgrounds to rejoice special moments and emotions in our lives with our loved ones. They are also the disruption in our day-to-day exhausting realities of life, and give us some inspiration to live. Festivals also pass the legends, knowledge and traditions onto the next generation. We celebrate through religious, national and seasonal festivals along with some international days.
Our religious festivals across cast and creed help us learn equality. This has been practiced over the years to influence people in the society to make them more compassionate. While beliefs are on individual's discretion, the celebrations of festivals are experienced by mass irrespective of religions. All religious festivals offer the same message of love, tolerance and understanding. In general, spirit of festivals, be it Eid or Durgapuja or even Christmas, is felt by everybody. These religious festivals play a very important role in our economy too, as major purchases happen during this particular period of time which is almost 40% of any retail's yearly sales.
Seasonal festivals reflect attitude of people towards nature. These festivals are important because they are related to seasons attribute to lifestyle, fruits and food supply. Human beings should adore the nature and acknowledge its beneficence before partaking any of its gifts. Bangla New Year -- or Pôhela Boishakh -- connects all Bangalees, irrespective of religious and regional differences. Bangalees across the world and from all walks of life unite to celebrate this universal festival of Bangalees; it's the occasion to welcome the New Year with new hopes of peace, prosperity and goodwill. The magnitude of this celebration is no less than any religious festival; hence its economic impact is also mention worthy.
National Festivals connect us as a people of a nation. National festivals connect citizens to important moments of a nation's history: the Victory Day of a nation, our Independence Day or Mother Language Day. They solidify patriotic spirits in the society. Having said that, we also observe people in our country are celebration English New Year, Valentine's Day that shows the world is slowly becoming more connected in terms of values and humanity.
Universally, all festivals are related to harmony, peace and happiness. To make celebrations sustainable for future generations, this is the high time to think about green festivals, by observing occasions like noise-free day by every car on the street, clean your community week every locality, sow a sapling by every citizen of the country to get higher score on corporate citizenship etc.
The writer is a communication professional working with an advertising company.
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