 Every day is Thanksgiving in India. I'll explain more about that here on Global Connections with our esteemed guest, Madhi Khandekar, who joins us from New York, where she is an Indian person associated with the United Nations. Madhi, welcome to the show. Aloha, Jay. And always a pleasure and honor to join you, especially in this Thanksgiving and when the festivities are beginning. So, joyful time to join. So. Oh, the same here. Sometimes we assume American holidays are celebrated around the world. That's kind of myopic, because it's not true. In some countries, however, there is a trend towards celebrating Western holidays and American holidays. Thanksgiving in some countries, but it's not commonly celebrated in India. It's observed, however, in the state of Goa, and we're gonna show you where that is under a different name, popularly known as Ladinah, or Ladin. Ladin literally means litany to the Virgin Mary, which reveals the Christian origin of the holiday in Goa. So let's talk about Goa. Let's talk about the rest of India, because India in a word is so super diverse. It's diverse in holidays. It's diverse in customs and cultures and languages, the whole thing. And so you can speak to that, Marri, I know you can. Tell us about Thanksgiving in India. Yes, Jay. Of course, of course, India is like a celebration. It's synonymous with celebration and the diversity that so many cultures, so many religions. It's a melting pot, exactly like America. It's a mirror image of America. And being a democracy, there is a freedom of religion, freedom of expression. So you're free to practice what you feel like. And the Thanksgiving, when we look at it in the American perspective, it was celebrated as a harvest festival. They celebrated a corn harvest in 1621, a difficult corn harvest. So we have similar festivals, like we have a baisakhi in Punjab, and Holi, and Oman. Let's see where Punjab is. Punjab, in the north of India. Okay, we have a map. That means they celebrate springtime, they celebrate the harvest, they have swings, they have colorful clothes, dance, music, food. Exactly the same way that we begin festivals in America. So you have baisakhi in Punjab, you have Onam in the south of India, you have Holi in Maharashtra, Gujarat. So these festivals are basically, Jay, celebrating your harvest. So if you look in the terms of... 1621, I thought you said 1621. Yes, 1621. First, when the pilgrims came to climb up. Yeah, I think 1610 or 1621. Yeah, okay, now 1621, before the English ever came to India, right? Yeah, yeah. It was only the Indians. Yeah. The red Indians over there and the Indians over here. So now this is the one in Punjab? Yes, Punjab is baisakhi. So Jay, because we are countries which depend on the weather and the harvest, we celebrate it because you are tanking nature for giving abundance of harvest. And that is exactly the spirit of Thanksgiving where you express gratitude for the family, for the friends and for the belongings and what you get from towards yourself. So that basic tenet of Thanksgiving is celebrated all the time everywhere in India. And if you see the number of festivals that India has, it's humongous because out of 365 days, we have I think around 300 days where we have something which is celebrated in a day. So spring, sun, moon, stars, you name it, we have it. And everything revolves around a meal. Like how in Thanksgiving, the turkey becomes the center. In India, in different festivals, you have milk sometimes is the center. You have puran poli, which is a sweet flatbread, which is the center of the table. And everywhere, like in Thanksgiving in America, a home cooked meal is what satisfies the palette of the people and family is given importance. So these locus, focus of the festivals is the same in both the countries. And now coming to the very concept of Thanksgiving because America has the biggest Indian diaspora. You have cousins in America who celebrate Thanksgiving. So why not, we should also celebrate it in India. So that's the kind of give and take that happens because Halloween is picking up in a big way in India. Oh, really? Yeah. And outsourcing, you have the call centers, which are in India. So they work according to the American timetable. So you have Thanksgiving, you have Halloween holidays. So this kind of culture, which you absorb and take into your own net is the kind of character that India has. So we are having Thanksgiving celebrated in luxury hotels. You have Thanksgiving banquets. Maybe Turkey is not cooked at home, but you will have a seven-star luxury hotel celebrating a traditional Turkey and you'll have many people take us for that. So it's an act of expressing all that exactly the way it's celebrated in America in India. So they're making an effort to absorb it. And you never know, Jay. You can have Indian cousins put into Thanksgiving in a couple of, in a few years. So that's going to happen, adaptation. Well, what about the adaptation? So you have people from India in the US to large immigrant group. And in fact, I wouldn't even call them immigrants anymore. They're as American as anyone else in a second, third generation. So do they carry with them the notion of Thanksgiving in India when they celebrate Thanksgiving in the US? Yes, they do. You see, when Thanksgiving is like the beginning of the holidays, isn't it? Travel comes into action. You have a family which comes together and you have gratitude which is expressed. So this kind of things, when you have distant family also living in India, you will call up. You will see other people thanking their family. You have distant family in India. You will say hello, how are you and this Thanksgiving over here and you give a courtesy call. So like we go back to the concept of being a global village, Jay. So we are all together in this and a community family becomes very important in these holidays. So even if you're alone, you kind of celebrate with the community. So that kind of togetherness that these holidays bring is far important than the manner in which we celebrate. So that way. A couple of things I want to ask you about. In my very brief reading on this, I concluded that whatever you call it in India, it is Thanksgiving is ubiquitous. In other words, all the holidays we can think of, all the ones you were naming is thanking the heavens and the stars and the deity, whatever, for something, right? So Thanksgiving, and what I said in the title to the episode was in India, Thanksgiving is all year round because all of these holidays could be at any time. They don't necessarily have to be at the end of November. There could be any time, but there's a common denominator between all these holidays we talked about that you mentioned, it's thanks for something, right? Correct, correct. Point on Jay, point on, absolutely point. So the other thing you mentioned, I want to pursue a little bit is family because in this country, my observation over the past few years, I'm getting very observant of such things. Family has deteriorated and the nuclear families on this big, it goes in every direction you could think of and they may or may not make that call on Thanksgiving. They may or may not see each other from month to month and year to year. Our filmmaking and our art seems to suggest that a lot of families are broken in this country. I mean, it makes for a good movie, but it's a sad story. And I wonder, my guess is that in India, families are really tight. You would be tight with your parents and your grandparents, you'd be tight with your kids and your siblings and your uncles and aunts. It's an Asian thing, but it's universal too. But I wonder if you could talk about the notion and the practice of family in India and especially at the time of a holiday. CJ, in India, the family, we are a very populated country. Asia itself is very populated. You all live together. So the distance between you and your parents, you and your family is not as distant as it might be over here. And so many traditions depend on generation to generation. It is first generation carrying the third generation, first generation giving to your own children. So this kind of intertwining of the religious festivities makes it a point that you call upon, you have a lot of call upon your family. So you have a lot of festivals which celebrate the bond between a brother and a sister. So you need to go and physically be there with your sister or your brother and tie a thread of protection around them. So that kind of thing that which makes you want to, makes you, directs you to go and meet that person. These bonds, even though you are a nuclear family, even though you stay apart, you will tend to come together for these moments and that when you have so many festivals in a year, you tend to meet each other on a more or less a daily basis. So 306 days are festivals, J, out of 365. So you have weekends coming in and one more thing is that in India, you tend to celebrate other religious festivals also. There is not, there is no restriction that you have to be celebrating only Hindu festivals or only Muslim festivals or only Sikh festivals. You can just intermingle and even if your friend is of another religion, you can go and join in the festivities. So it's kind of a whoever wants to join in, come on, let's go kind of a situation in India. So family unit, if friends are being picked up so intimately, imagine the kind of attraction that family has to have during festivals. So you call upon your parents for lunches, you, they stay with you. This all is a very entangled process. And in America, we see that there is a distance because of the mobility for employment, the income, what is that? Seeking opportunities that we go for, that causes the distance. And in India, you have family businesses which are run from father to son too. So the son kind of stays if he is in the same business as the father or if he is staying in the same house that his father owns. But if he's going for income seeking opportunity, he will have to go to another place. So it's one step away from America like that. So that's the situation. But family, I mean, even if you're alone in the US, you come to community. Your community becomes your family. So that is important. Is that important in India? Very much, very much. I had spoken to you about this. You remember the langars that there is a Punjabi community which organizes langars. I mean, if you don't have anything, you can go to this Kuru Dwarak temple of worship and you will be provided meals, you will be provided shelter. They will not distance. That is why community plays a big role. If there's earthquake, you have the rastra seva sum coming in. You have, that's the RSS. That's the ruling BJP-led social organization. You have the Punjabis who come in with their langars and their support. The Maharashtras, the NCC. There are so many organizations which play the role of community-building, Jay. So and festivals were taken to be a community-building exercise by Lokmanya Tilak in the independence movement. He said, celebrated, come together, unite as a community so that we develop the feeling of unity and togetherness to fight against colonization. Of course. So he celebrate the Ganpati festival, which is celebrated with great enthusiasm in Maharashtra. So Ganpati festival is extravagant, Jay. So that you just, the entire city comes onto the streets, they dance, they have a good time, they have food, they have family, you visit friends, you visit family. That is the extravagance and you feel like you are together. How long is it last, Mahadev? 10 days, 10 days. 10 days of it's a disco, like being on the streets in Maharashtra. Even Diwali is 10 days. So I know you, we've talked about this before. You come from Pune, which is in that particular state. What's life like in Pune? What is special about Pune and how does Thanksgiving figure in Pune? Pune is amazing, it's my hat. And it's a pension, I don't know, it's a pensioner's town, they used to call it, but the British headquarters. But it's got a taste of the Maharashtra culture, which you see. You have the Ganpati festival, which is celebrated. It's a world-class celebration, Jay. I mean, you have people from every country which come to watch this because it's nothing like you can expect, nothing you can ever see. There is so much noise and so much of dance and so much of devotion, which goes through the elephant god for 10 whole days. I mean, nobody sleeps for 10 whole days. This is a good place to go as a tourist then. You may want to travel to Pune and be a tourist and participate in 10 days of revelry. And what a good time is that, yeah. Yeah, revelry. I mean, it's not one parade, it's not one day, it's 10 days of madness, Jay. And I mean, every city in India has got one thing which is something like this, like Dasera in Diwali is celebrated with grandeur in the city of Mysore, South India. They have, and all these festivals, Jay, it's thanksgiving or it's expressing gratitude to the gods for giving us whatever we have. So every festival carries the theme of thanksgiving. So a traditional thanksgiving in every Indian festival is what you've been talking about. So that's what runs through all these festivals. So one of the common denominators would be there, it's every festival gives thanks. Another common denominator, I'm guessing here, you have to tell me if I'm right. Now, as you're talking about food, you're talking about candles, wine, talking about flowers, talking about decoration and talking about a big meal of some kind. So talk to us about the accoutrements that you find throughout India on these various festivals, these thanksgiving type of festivals. What's the food like? What are the things that you celebrate with? Yes, Jay, so food always is the central part of every celebration and of every festival and home cooked meals, one of the key ingredients of these festivals. So basically, firstly first, it is the harvest that happens close to the festival. So you have corn flatbread and spinach which is grown in the Punjab festival like I told you by Saki in Maharashtra, Gujarat. It is the fresh vegetables that is made into vegetable curry and flatbread and rice. You have these things which come on the palate from the fields. So when you see this and when you feel that there has been a good harvest, you kind of tend to unknowingly express the gratitude towards that food and when your family surrounds your table, you feel that it is complete, isn't it? So you have delicacies and a lot of sweets are prepared in Indian festivals too. You have a variety of sweets which are pure sugar and they are prepared in the most traditional way. You have coconuts, all the fresh ingredients that come in, coconut, you have jaggery which is a good substitute for sugar which is used a lot in Indian sweets. You have a lot of, what is that, jellies that you like. So it's a wide range of sweets that come in and there's a tradition in India that you always keep them out sweet so that sweet things happen to you. So that's what gives the importance of sweets and a large portion of India is vegetarian. So the non-veg turkey is a little bit of a restricted, it's not on the palate, mostly you go for a vegetarian palate in the festivals but the non-veg palate is of course, for sections of the cosmopolitan crop but mainly it's vegetarian and food and that thing. What about the traditional American table? Is there turkey, is there sweet potatoes? Is there cranberry sauce? I don't know, a few other things I'm sure we'll all find out in the American Thanksgiving but do you see those foods in India? That's what I'm telling you Turkey because of the commercialization of Thanksgiving you have the luxury chain of hotels celebrating with the traditional turkey. You will have, we have buffets in India. You know the buffet system, you have an entire dinner or lunch setup, a brunch setup and during Thanksgiving, particularly during Thanksgiving, they keep place a big turkey which you can go and have. So this, like the same way, see Valentine's Day is not traditional in India or New Year's Eve is not traditional in India but it is caught on such a large scale that just because of the commercialization. So now this is coming in as the next step from Halloween. Halloween started because the kids are enjoying it. The children are enjoying Halloween in India. So if the kids enjoy, the parents enjoy. So they have pumpkins and costumes and all that. They are doing it big time. We do have pumpkins in India, the big ones. They're known as Bhopla in India. When people go out to restaurants for these holidays or stay home, is it both or what happens? See, turkey, usually I don't think it's on the traditional Indian cooking this but going to restaurants is now much convenient, isn't it? You call, like you said, we have nuclear families. You call your family and you say, let's meet up at this place and let's have a nice dinner and then they can take care of the dishes. So that's why. Division of labor. Exactly, if you can afford it, let's go for it. So I want to ask you about some of the others that I found in my reading. So there's, let's see, there's Onam, there's Baisaki. There's Duvali or Duvali. These are other holidays in various places around the country and those places could be thousands of miles apart. So are they all in the fall? Are they all harvest holidays or are they spread around the year? And are they all, I guess they're all giving thanks for one thing or another but they must differ in some ways because they're so far apart. Can you talk about the differences and how much similarity they bear and how much similarity do they bear to Thanksgiving itself? Right Jay, Duvali, Onam and Baisaki, like you said, are all celebrating festivals but we have two harvest times in India. One is the spring harvest, one is the winter harvest. That's why we have this spread across the year. So and the distance that you talk of it's because one harvest in the northern part is different from the southern part of India. So you have this kind of different timings but the main tenet of the thing or the festival remains the same to celebrate harvest and to celebrate togetherness and family. So, Duvali, like I told you, it's a 10 day festivity which celebrates another God coming from Ayodhya. It's a different story altogether. You express gratitude to the ideal version of man. That's a, I'll explain it to you a little later. But the harvest, purely harvest festivals are the Baisaki, the Onam, the holy spring time. Jay, you will know the Tomatino festival in Spain where they play with tomatoes, la tomatino. So, holy is a festival in India where you play with colors and water. You celebrate spring with colors and water. You're rubbing color into people's face and your family gets together and you have sweet delicacies. But holy is one of the biggest festivals in India of Lord Krishna. You will see that it's, I mean, I tell it for every festival and it's true. It's a crazy enthusiastic festival where you are just playing like a child with color. Wonderful. Yeah, well. And the entire country plays with you not one family or one community. The entire country is playing. You'll be walking on the street and somebody can throw a balloon on you and say, it's holy, you can't do anything about it. Just like the cows, the sacred cows. Yes, everywhere, everywhere. And so these things, it sounds like just a thought now and I'm really interested in your thought on this. It sounds like some of these elements of the holidays happen between the holidays. For example, the family aspect and the colors and the gatherings and the festival nature of gathering. The notion of thanking people and being out in the street with a community of people in your city or neighborhood. It sounds to me like this actually defines life in India in many places between the holidays. So you can almost say that India is one great big holiday. Would you say that? I would most definitely, undoubtedly and directly say that India is just one big holiday. You know, Diwali was declared as one, first time it was declared as a public holiday in New York. So it was declared one day. In India it is like 10 days, 15 days holiday for school, 20 days holiday for Christmas. We have Christmas vacations in India which are 20 days vacation day. We have summer vacations for two and a half months. So you just need a small excuse in the way that I have a holiday in India. Well, you have a foot in each camp and you lived in the US, you know what happens here and you know the focus and the essence of our celebrations of various holidays. And then you know what happens in India. And I wonder, this is a hard question. Are you ready for a hard question with Bonnie? Yes. What can the US learn from India about holidays, about Thanksgiving, about being thankful, about celebrating with family and community? You know, we have so many issues in this country about divisiveness and hostility and hatred and bigotry and what have you. What can we learn from India as expressed through these Indian holidays? See, the United States is as good as home. So that's why you have an Indian diaspora which has settled in and is thriving in the United States. There is not much of a difference between the United States society and the Indian society, correct Jay? So you have a kind of feel at home condition in America. So that's why the Indians have felt more than comfortable to settle in and progress with America. So when we draw in conclusions and lessons from each other, we can say that we both are at the helm of keeping a democracy alive, isn't it? To keep your expression of freedom of expression thriving and you can keep your religious affiliations along with your secular expressions to celebrate every and each festival. So you have commercialization of festivals and you have adaptation of festivals into your traditional framework. And so when you see that each and everything and life itself is a celebration, isn't Jay? You should celebrate each and every moment in life and that's the way how you gather moments and make a life out of it. And if there are celebrations in between, all the more better. So you have to have this lovely accompaniments of family or food or tradition of love of community. And that's how we can make it a wonderful life and life is really beautiful and ups and downs in life are common place, isn't it? Who doesn't have thorns in the life? So that's part and parcel. But to celebrate the good moments is far better than crying over a spilt milk on the drawbacks of life, isn't it? Yes, oh yes. So all this makes me remember that it was only six months ago so that you were back in India and here we are at Thanksgiving time and you're here in the United States. Did you consider going back again? Did you consider having the celebrations at this time of year in India instead of the US? I can join in any time and join any festivity or it's a constant party over there. So it's absolutely okay. But I'm very, very grateful to the life that we have here in the US. I'm grateful for your friendship for the association that I have with Think Tech Hawaii and it's always a lovely thing to express this emotion because we are bound together by connection and lots of love, Jay. So it's lovely to be, I don't miss. It's a home at every point. Yes, oh yes. And at the same time, I'm sorry to say that I have actually never met you in person after all these years. Yes, we will be with you. So if there's a rumor that you're coming out to Hawaii for Thanksgiving this week, is that true? I will go. Most definitely I will go. And definitely. Okay, well, Udmati, I want to wish you a happy Thanksgiving. I really appreciate your thoughts on this and the cultural points you raise and what I call it the international vision that you have in terms of bringing people together. And yes, we can learn from India. We can learn from family and celebration and holiday. Thank you very much for coming on our show. Thank you so much, Jay. And I'm really grateful for our friendship. Thank you so, so very much. We'll meet again soon. We'll think of something else to cover. Thank you so much. Happy Thanksgiving, Udmati. For you too, Jay. Happy Thanksgiving. And enjoy the holidays. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.