A Laymans Guide to "Thanksgiving"

I wrote this to my sister-in-law after receiving her invitation to a Thanksgiving bhajan evening at her place a couple of weeks ago. Thought you might enjoy it!

Jyoti,


We’ll definitely try and be there if only for a short time.

Just so’s the rest of the family unnerstans a bit more about this here “Thanksgivin”, I thawt I’d give ma version of the his-story of this innerestin American festival!

So there are these 100 odd rather puritanical Brits who were dead set against the Church of England and it’s debauched ways. So one day, they decided to head off to this magical place they’d heard of from previous settlers called the New World. (I really don’t know what Huxley was thinking of - trying to create his perfect world nearly 300 years later – didn’t he read history?) Anyway, so these Brits set off and completely by mistake, they first hit the Netherlands across the channel, thinking to themselves that they’d reached rather quickly. When they learned of their mistake, in pique they grabbed some easily subdued Dutch people and sailed off in the other direction.

After a terrible journey with no air-conditioning or even toilets, they finally hit a big rock which they christened Plymouth, out of respect for the tiny little island that they’d left behind.
They got off the rock and immediately tried their hands at communism, which hadn’t been invented at the time, a fact that did not seem to worry them unduly. They improvised. They decreed (decreeing was big in those days – people never just decided things, they decreed and in some cases proclaimed them) that all the surrounding land was hereby communal property and each man should work as much as he wanted and take as much as he needed. Yeah, right! That has the hallmark of a winning strategy! That’s like telling US Auto workers to decide their own work hours and salaries – whoops. That’s what they did for the past couple of decades, didn’t they? Anyway, just like a dude called Marx many years later, they failed. (Yet another example of how people could learn from the mistakes of their forefathers if they only spent some time reading). More than half of them died of starvation and disease and if it hadn’t been for some native Indians who, after curiously observing them for nearly a year in open mouthed astonishment, decided to help. So they shook hands and taught these strange people how to farm the land and tend to their sick. This worked and by the next harvesting time, there was enough food for everyone and some left over.

Now here is where there is a minor divergence of views on historical facts. Some good people say that in sheer happiness, the Brits proclaimed a great feast to which these very Indians were invited to celebrate and break bread with them in a spirit of “let’s all learn to share and live in complete harmony”. Some others, obviously ‘bad’ people however, rather rudely claim that having learnt how to farm the land and use native medicine, the Brits decided to eliminate the Indians so that they wouldn’t have to share the land any more. So they massacred the entire tribe and then a great feast was proclaimed to celebrate the elimination of competition.

Either way – you get the picture. Proclamations and celebrations are common to both views, so why quibble the details?

And by the way, all this happened in August for the first time following a harvest but subsequent US President’s sequentially changed it to November, declared it a holiday, struck the holiday and then again declared it a public holiday to be held on the fourth Thursday of November. (By this time declarations of various kinds had become popular, replacing the antiquated decrees and proclamations which were thought to be a mite feudal).

So ther’y’are folks! That’s the reel story of Thanksgivin for ya. Hope yo’all enjoyed it and will show up to share the celebrations even though you are Indians!

Sanjiv Desai
Senior Partner

TRANSEARCH INDIA
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sdesai@transearchindia.com
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