Janmashtami Special

Janmashtami marks the birth of Lord Krishna, on the eighth day of the dark fortnight of Bhadrapada. In the story he is born at midnight in a prison cell, and carried across a river to safety while the guards sleep. What follows is a childhood of butter stolen from clay pots, cows and cowherds, and a flute whose sound stopped whoever heard it.

It is kept with fasting until midnight, with bhajans and dance, with cradles rocked and sweets shared, from Mathura and Vrindavan to temples on every continent.

The teachings that come later, in the Bhagavad Gita, still answer the questions people bring to work on a Monday morning. But the festival itself is mostly joy.

A harmonium, a pair of tabla, a set of small brass cymbals, and a room of people who know the words. That is the whole apparatus of a bhajan, and it has needed nothing more for centuries.

What the songs do is simple. They hold a crowd in one rhythm and let everyone in it forget, for a while, that they arrived separately. Some of these melodies are older than the buildings they are sung in.

Two objects tell you most of what you need to know about Krishna. A length of bamboo with seven holes in it, and a single peacock feather worn in the hair.

The flute is the reason the stories keep saying that everything stopped: the cows, the river, the women carrying pots home at dusk. The feather is what the peacocks are said to have given him freely, for making them dance.

Neither is a symbol of power. That is rather the point of him.