It’s that time of the year when our digital life announces the advent of festival season with new narratives that scream bigger, bolder and battier.
Harbingers of the Navratri or Pujo season are not just the bais, who issue advance alerts of proceeding on Pujo pilgrimages to their hometowns back in Bengal, but also the advance notifications of a blitzkrieg of bonanzas beeping on smartphones from many a czar of the consumerism war. Smartphones squiggle to constant alerts of upcoming mega sales or offers by e-commerce biggies — Amazon to Myntra, Swiggy to Zomato, Blinkit to BigBasket & Co.
Tantalising teasers of consumerist templates trigger a seasonal national hobby — scripting Navratri and Diwali wishlists over the morning cuppa rather than the customary scanning of newspapers.
The consumerist blitzkrieg mounted by marketers starts to eat into not only morning bed-tea moments but even meal times. Sample a recent ad by an air fryer brand boasting a new multitasking model. It kept popping up during commercial breaks at dinner-time TV viewing, as peskily and persistently as Arnab Goswami airing his lung power or breaking news blokes doing a bheja fry.
The new air fryer model sparked a dinner-time debate far more animated than India’s golds at the Asian Games or gold wishlists for Dhanteras.
A battle of Gen Old-School (read old-fashioned) versus Gen Z — Gen Slowness versus Gen Jhatpat.
The multipurpose air fryer commercial unwittingly tossed up a metaphor of the modern mantra for the Navratri season. The commercial gloats and gushes about the benefits of a multipurpose air fryer. The new model boasts myriad functions all rolled into one — fryer, steamer, baking oven, blah blah. The supermom or superman of gadgetry.
It symbolises how newer Navratri narratives are becoming more and more about mindless multitasking. It drove home how digital-age consumerism and celebrations are more about speed than savoured slowness.
Nowadays, Navratri preparations herald a cramming and crowding of multiple roles into festival calendars. Rushing for dandiya-garba practice lessons, signing up for pottery masterclasses from idol-sculpting to diya-making, and enrolling in a bhajan club since it’s the fashionable fad your entire kitty gang is falling for.
Gone are the times of gently gearing up for festivals, bit by bit, bite by bite. Slipping away are the days of unrushed, unhurried conventional baking or frying of festival savouries on autumn afternoons.
Fading away is the aroma of deep-fried farali pattice, mathhis, namakparas, gujiyas and gur-paaras wafting all across the house, announcing that matriarchs had waddled into festive mode.
Fading away is the community or clannish commotion of scores of hands together rolling out moa to narkel nadus, or deep frying baigun bhajjas to phulkopir singaaras ahead of Pujo. Enter the air-fryer festivities’ generation. Move over, naani-dadi narratives of Navratri.
The air fryer is the modern mascot of nuclear Navratri. The deep-frying rasoi revelry, on the contrary, symbolised community celebrations.
Granted, air-fryer living is high on health benefits, jhatpat consumption, and convenience, and low on labour and calories. But this jhatpat air-fryer living is robbing our festivals of community celebration and charmed chaos.
Gadgets that stuff and scream multiple functions — be it all under one hot tin roof of an air fryer or on phones that fold out to myriad roles of mini laptop-cum-mini TV screen — are a metaphor for the mania for more. Multitasked air-fryer living is the new more.
As the Navratri notifications or marketing mania pop up on Tweeple’s smartphones or small screens constantly, selling a multitasking fryer or phone, maybe all one can do is rewind to the nostalgia of non-consumerist festivals and pre-air-fryer Navratri narratives.