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By Ajith Samaranayake

So Vesak this year got caught in the coils of commerce just as it has happened to Christmas for the last so many years. If Christmas now is a festival of the shop-keepers or the super marketeers Vesak has become a carnival for the advertisers and the electronic media. The various television stations enticed the populace to gather round their respective totem poles and while they gaped and gawped the merchants stepped into sell their goods.

Don't get us wrong we are no kill-joys. There is certainly a celebratory aspect to Vesak and indeed it can even be argued and with justification at that that since Buddhism is an overtly spiritual creed this celebratory aspect is even more important than in other religions. But what we are witnessing today is the eclipse of that sense of innocent celebration by a calculatedly commercial spirit, a competition between the mass media to mount the most dazzling show, to give away the biggest prizes, attract the largest crowd.

Gone are the days when schoolchildren made Vesak lanterns for the sheer joy and pleasure of it and displayed it outside their homes. Now they are been commanded by the electronic media to bring their lanterns to certain venues and get into a rat race to win prizes. Gone are the days when the more prosperous mudalalis of certain towns put up pandals as part of their project of personal self-aggrandizement. Today the new mudalalis of the electronic media have commandeered whole channels to project their image and throw their shadow across the entire country.

So what has happened is that Vesak has now become part of show biz. It has become incorporated into that phantasmagoria with which television bedazzles us every day. To the television industry everything is part of a large ongoing spectacle. Whether it is the staging of a New Year festival with all the traditional trappings or the selling of deodorants the television and advertising industries take it in their stride. May be this is part of the inevitable process of modernisation about which we should not gripe too much but somehow it was saddening to see the spirit of Vesak being crushed on the small screen.

Talking of television how standardised can this business become. The competitive spirit has so eaten into the industry that there is no variety in it any more. If one station has a cookery program at a certain time all the other stations are sure to have the same fare at the same time. The morning program for housewives has similarly become so standardised that there is no sense of excitement or novelty any more. Beauty, cookery, physical jerks and the Home Beautiful - these are all what the compilers seem to think about. Of course all this goes to feed the fantasies of middle-class housewives who cannot really afford to emulate the good life projected on the screen, but obtain some kind of vicarious fulfilment by watching it. And of course it is good for business.

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