Tomatinoe Farce
While hundreds of millions of Indians are left to starve every year and denied access to basic services like Public Distribution System (PDS) which would provide them subsidized food, a section of the Indian super rich and their spoilt brats have reached another level of extreme self indulgence. Inspired by a latest Bollywood flick whose crew took part in the La Tomatinoe festival in Spain, they wanted to replicate this silver screen frenzy by throwing tomatoes at each other and have fun. So every major city event management companies are now wanting to hold these tomatinoe festivals. Novel idea indeed for a starving nation! But unfortunately for the organizers not many ordinary people were pleased this time. They started protesting. The first state to organize this was Karnataka and the government had to ban the event.
Not to be easily broken, the organizers have cleverly stated that they would now only be using rotten tomatoes instead! So they will let tons of tomatoes to simply rot and use it to immerse themselves in the false glorification of living the “bollywood dream”. WAY TO GO indeed! A possible analogy to this vulgarity is the food grains in the government go-downs left to rot every year while millions of poor people and their malnourished children are left to starve. Now cities like Kolkata, Pune, Delhi and others are not far behind from replicating the event to their own elitist citizens.
Due to heavy floods in parts of Orrisa and Andhra Pradesh, India has lost a significant amount of food crops this year. Tomatoes prices have doubled. But the ignorant narcissists of India are busy devising such ingenious methods of using food crops. BJP (and Shiv Sena) shouting hoarse over Valentine’s Day celebrations for the past few years on the ground that it was Westernization of Indian youth and also called it a cultural genocide has no problem with the idea of La Tomatinoe. In fact the first two states to permit such events were Gujarat and Karnataka, both BJP ruled states. Suddenly their argument is “Such cultural interactions are beneficial for our youth to indulge into”. Why this duality?
Stop this Madness!
The New Socialist Alternative (CWI – India) calls for the immediate stop on all the La Tomatinoe events scheduled across many cities of India. We feel this is not merely a question of cultural incompatibility to the cultural ethos of this land mass, but mainly an insult on those hundreds of millions of starving people and on those 200,000 plus peasants who have killed themselves unable to get a fair price for their produce, thus plunging them into a cycle of debt and despondence. Events like La Tomatinoe is only an expression of rotten predatory nature of the Indian capitalism which seeks to profit from everything including rotting food!
Saptarshi Banerjee
Bangalore