Impacts Of Diwali Festival: Social Cohesiveness

A part of sociological understanding includes giving up the idea that human behaviour is just what people ought to do because our decisions are affected by society. So whether celebrating festivals is your innate will or whether you’re succumbed by the immense pressure of your family and friends, festivals are important and they impact us in all sorts of ways, the first one would be Strengthening ethical and moral beliefs.

More often than not festivals help us get closer to our religion and mythological beliefs as essentially these two are strongly correlated, and that in itself is a pretty big deal because sometimes it can feel like our lives our such tiny blips in the universe’s grand scheme, and it can be hard to imagine why our action really matters.

Festivals help people to understand their actions as meaningful, by framing them underneath the greater purpose of their god’s plan. By getting us closer to our religious festivals can therefore also help us exercise social control as people behave well out of a desire to remain in god’s good graces because many of such religious guidelines match up with societal norms like respecting parents no and not practising crimes and adulteries. e.g festivals like Holi helps the people to believe in the virtue of being truthful and honest and also to fight away evil.

Social Cohesiveness –

In this reclusive era, we often ignore the significance of social Cohesiveness and solidarity and that’s where festivals like Diwali and Eid comes into play, I.e to teach us the importance of social solidarity in our lives. Diwali is a unifying event and it can conquer even hauteur of all hearts, exchanging goods and sweets with relatives during Diwali has emerged itself as a social fact i.e it is not something you and I came up with but because this fact is so coercive, we all tend to follow it and that’s the beauty of these festivals; were exchanging goods, festivals or even greetings (Eid) strengthens social Cohesiveness and unites us.

But just like with everything else in the world, festivals are not all glory with no gloom. Sometimes these festivals might also act as a dysfunction to society.

While these festivals strengthen ethical understanding of the society they can also impede social and religious qualities, the reason why 19 people were killed in Lucknow itself during Holi celebrations because of group clashes. Apart from introducing religious inequalities these festivals can also harm our beautiful nature, e.g burning crackers is a fairly popular ritual of Diwali celebration but this ritual comes at a cost, a cost of demolishing our own sheen nature.

So it all boils down to mitigating dysfunctions of these festivals and embracing their beauty to the fullest.