New Delhi, Sept. 28 -- Festivals in India are always about gathering. Streets swelling with people, kitchens flooding with smells, drums beating louder than memory. But the question is never just what we celebrate. It is also who gets to gather and celebrate, and under what terms. The answers are rarely innocent. They carry centuries of exclusion, of walls around holy sites, of rules about who could touch water, of songs that only some were allowed to sing.

Still, against that weight, another current has always flowed. A quieter, riskier, stubborn one. A current where festivals were not tools of control but sparks of freedom. Where joy was not rationed by caste but shared as breath. Where devotion itself was justice. Buddha, Sant Ravidas...