By Sadhguru – Founder, Isha Foundation
Wherever I travel, whatever kinds of groups of people I meet, I have spoken to top-level scientists, academics and students at very prestigious universities and various kinds of people, but I always find that the groups I meet in India are far sharper and smarter than most people anywhere in the world.
India as a culture, with all its apparent disorganisation, used to be very organised deep down. It functioned very systematically. Even today the nation has not broken down completely simply because of that deep in-built cultural organisation.
With all the surface disharmony, there is something deep which is holding things together. I don’t believe that it is the government or the law or the infrastructure which is holding society together in India. Somewhere there is something in people which still keeps things rolling.
If the level of poverty that is there in India was there in any other country, they would kill each other; that is how they would react to this level of poverty. But in India, with this level of poverty, still maintaining some sanity and going on with their activities, still celebrating their festivals, this takes a different kind of in-built mechanism which was put in by the culture.
Making life into a celebration
In the Indian culture, there was a time when there used to be a festival every day of the year — 365 festivals in a year — because a festival is a tool to bring life to a state of exuberance and enthusiasm. That was the significance and importance of festivals. The whole culture was in a state of celebration. If today was ploughing day, it was a kind of celebration. Tomorrow was planting day, another kind of celebration. Day after tomorrow was weeding, that was a celebration. Harvesting, of course, is still a celebration.
In India, depending upon what food grains you grew — I am not talking about cash crops — you worked hard for 50 to 100 days in a year and the rest of the time was a series of festivals. Every village had its own festivals to which people from the surrounding villages came. Every wedding was at least five days of celebration. Work for sustenance was only 50 to 100 days in a year.
But in the last 400 or 500 years, poverty has come to our country and we have not been able to celebrate every day. People are satisfied if they just get some simple food to eat. So all the festivals fell away and only 30 or 40 festivals remain. We are not even able to celebrate those now because we have to go to the office or do something else daily. Today, once you have a 30-year mortgage, it is almost 365 days. So people usually celebrate only around 8 or 10 festivals annually.
Nowadays, unfortunately, a festival means they give you a holiday and you wake up only at twelve noon. Then you eat a lot and go for a movie or watch television at home. It wasn’t like that earlier. A festival meant the whole town would gather in a place and there would be a big celebration. A festival meant we got up at four in the morning and very actively, lots of things happened all over the house.
Now they also have to pay health insurance and grave insurance. When they are alive and healthy, people are paying in instalments for their funeral. Unless you are going to leave in a beautiful way that will be very useful for everyone around you — why are you bothered about how your funeral will be handled when you fall dead? I understand and appreciate if you do not want to be a nuisance to someone else, but what does it matter how they will bury or burn you? This kind of concern is going to take away your aliveness.
Another aspect is that you constantly have to do things like a machine, not out of passion. The whole society expects you to be a machine. You are not waking up in the morning because you want to make a difference in something today or because what you do is meaningful or because you want to do it — it is all about making a living. Making a living takes very little. It only becomes a problem when you want to live like someone else. If you just want to live, it is very simple — every human being is capable of this.
Making a living only becomes complicated when you want to live like someone else, when you want to have the things that your neighbour has. Today, the whole economic model on the planet is just about that and this keeps increasing the suicide rates, the numbers of cynical, frustrated people and the number of broken minds.
That is because there is no ease in life — you always have to do something. If you do not go to school, if you do not go to work, something bad will happen. And you cannot suddenly change the course of your life and do something else. Everyone is trying to compel you to do the same things all through your life. Affluence is not going to bring freedom to people — it is going to tie them up in knots.
The importance of festivals
To bring back this culture of celebration in people, Isha holds five important festivals every year: Pongal or Makara Sankranti, Mahashivarathri, Guru Purnima, Dussehra and Diwali. If we don’t create something like this, by the time the next generation comes, they will not know what a festival is. They will just eat, sleep and grow up without concern for another human being. All these aspects were brought into Indian culture just to keep a person active and enthusiastic in so many ways. The idea behind this was to make our whole life into a celebration.
If you approach everything in a celebratory way, you learn to be non-serious about life but absolutely involved. The problem with most human beings right now is, if they think something is important, they will become dead serious about it. If they think it is not so important, they will become lax about it — they don’t show the necessary involvement. You know, in India when someone says, “He is in a very serious condition,” that means his next step is you know where. A lot of people are in a serious condition. There is only one thing that is going to happen to them which is of any significance. The rest will bypass them because with anything that they think is not serious, they are unable to show involvement and dedication towards that. That is the whole problem. The passage, the secret of life is to see everything with a non-serious eye, but be absolutely involved — like a game. That is the reason the most profound aspects of life are approached in a celebratory way, so that you don’t miss the point.
[Sadhguru, a yogi, is a visionary, humanitarian and a prominent spiritual leader. An author, poet and internationally-renowned speaker, Sadhguru’s wit and piercing logic provoke and widen our perception of life. www.ishafoundation.org]
This post was published on August 21, 2026 7:30 pm