kolkata pujas special gift

With autumn comes the biggest festival of the Bengalees, the Durga Puja. A five-day festival, which starts from the evening of Mahashasthi and ends at Dashami brings the biggest happiness for each and every Bengalee. It is the time to get out of the house in colourful dresses and hopping from pandel to pandel, have delicious food and spend great times with friends and family members. Durga Puja is a religious tradition of the Hindus that has gradually turned into a huge carnival in Kolkata over the year and now it has become a major commercial event too. Today’s Durga Puja is much more than a mere cultural and religious festival. Today it is a mega event with a strong commercial entity, an opportunity to generate maximum revenue in minimum time.

Puja committees arrange for Durga Puja which comes as an opportunity to worship the Goddess for the local people. But behind such a noble intention there is a major financial cause. Durga Puja comes as the biggest scope to earn money for the clubs and the puja committees. They earn money from local membership and chanda (donations) and from the sponsors. Hoardings and banners of various companies are seen around the pandals of even the small pujas that are not much popular. For new companies, that are not quite reputed, Durga Puja comes as a great opportunity to get some publicity. As the popular puja pandals are visited by thousands of people they display their banner and hoardings to attract their eyes and the puja committees take advantage of that. Many puja committees allow companies to set their stalls around the puja compound and earn money as stall rent.

In the recent times, the media has also joined in this group. FM radio stations and TV channels compete hard with each other to become the official media partners of different reputed pujas. The committees earn huge money from them as sponsorship money and the media partners enjoy the extra publicity, which helps in raising their TRPs. Earlier Kolkata Doordarshan used to be the only channel to offer Puja coverage, which is popularly known as Puja Porikrama but these days one can watch Puja Porikrama in all Bengali channels. In fact the percentage of people watching puja coverage in Kolkata Doordarshan nowadays is negligible compared to that of the new Bengali news and entertainment channels because they offer much colorful live coverages and the reason is, behind the bid to entertain people there is a bigger motive for them.

Not only for the puja committees, media houses and companies, but Durga Puja comes as a scope to bag some extra money for common people too. Lots of people invest money in ventures like snacks bar, cold drink and ice cream stalls. As people from the fur flung areas of the city even from other parts of the state come fill up the streets, roads and lanes of Kolkata, these snacks bar and soft drinks stalls never remain vacant. It’s a five-day special trading season for such stall owners and at the end of the puja they get back home with heavy cash boxes.