Why things should be allowed to die

What Vesak lanterns teach us and when preservation becomes pathology

Walking past a school just before the Buddhist Vesak festival, I saw a group of young girls hang up lanterns with covers of transparent polymer. On the news, I saw coverage of the army dressing up the streets for Vesak with elaborately made lanterns, all protected from the elements by covers of plastic. With that, they reduced the profound lesson of the Vesak lantern and limited it to mere ornamentation.

2000, embassy Vesak lanterns covered in plastic

Vesak lanterns, traditionally made from bamboo and fragile tissue paper, carried the lesson of impermanence. As children, making a Vesak lantern—painstakingly tying bamboo pieces together—you learned about geometry as much as paper craft. It took days of cutting patterns and shapes and pasting them with a sticky homemade glue of flour and water. These were labours of love. But the lesson of the lanterns only revealed itself once they were hung outside, exposed to the elements. The Vesak festival, celebrated in the monsoony month of May, inevitably included rains. Nothing taught the Buddhist philosophy of impermanence like discovering the lantern you built, destroyed by rain. What was once loved and luminous now hung limp, skeletal, and beyond repair. It was a tradition that made the day after Vesak into a life lesson. Past the fairy tales, you had to reconcile with the reality of being alive. You came to understand that life and death weren’t opposing forces, but parts of the same process.

Covering this important lesson in plastic is a symptom of the deeper confusion of our time: the need to preserve what was never meant to last in an obstinate and unconscious drive to outsmart death.

1959 home and living magazine advertisement for Seran Wrap to ‘save’ things

Today, everything is wrapped in polymer sleeves. Earphones. Fruits. Flowers. Leftovers. Even the things that should be allowed to wither—old letters, sketchbooks, bills—are now preserved past their timeline. We keep birthday balloons. We vacuum-seal sentiments. We embalm objects not because they are precious, but because we can.

This isn’t preservation. This is pathology.

Plastic reflects our unspoken belief that decay is a problem. That entropy is failure. That change is loss. But when we try to keep the past intact, we keep the present from moving. We try to keep the earth from smelling like earth. We try to turn the world into a museum of itself.

2020, plastic is too expensive a ‘preservation’ tactic for the planet, Divotomezove

But what if we allowed things to soften? To shift? To be held for a while, then returned to the soil?

Not everything needs to be preserved.

Things need to be used.

Things need to end.

Things need to break down, to feed what comes next.

And perhaps the small return can begin—with one thing left uncovered. One child allowed to build a lantern that falls apart. One memory allowed to fade, so it can be reborn differently. We can choose to not plastic-coat rituals that honour impermanence.

Preservation is not the same as reverence. Stories don’t need to last forever to mean something.

The Mango (Part 2): a fruit carried by trade winds, power, and persistence

How South Asia’s iconic fruit left home and entered global culture

In Part 1 of our story on the mango, we discussed how this fruit was part of South Asian lives for centuries, and remains to stay so. If in South Asia the mango was a metaphor for life's richest ties—myth, memory, friendship—then it was only a matter of time before it became a story the world would carry, reshape, and consume.

circa 1765, Women Enjoying the River at the Forest's Edge, Hunhar II

Colonization, trade, and diplomacy during the early modern era (1500s onwards) uprooted not only goods exchange but also food and farming practices. Along the humid trade routes of the East India Companies, among the many treasures from the East, mangoes travelled. Seeds carefully packed for colonial gardens, descriptions of their ‘luscious flesh’ written into ship journals and diplomatic letters. By the 17th century, mango trees bloomed in the Caribbean, West Africa, and Brazil, while mangoes themselves acquired new roles—not as sacred symbols, but as exotic commodities and markers of wealth or influence.

1891, Mango, from the Fruits series (N12) for Allen & Ginter Cigarettes Brands commercial colour lithograph, Allen & Ginter and Geo. S. Harris and Sons.

One of the most surreal twists that placed the mango as a symbol of Maoist reforms came about in 1968, during a period of intense political upheaval known as the Cultural Revolution, the Pakistani Foreign Minister Mian Arshad Hussain gifted a crate of Pakistani mangoes to Chairman Mao Zedong. At that time, mangoes were an exotic rarity in China, and Mao himself wasn’t particularly interested in them—he didn't even eat them—but in a gesture both practical and symbolic, he re-gifted the mangoes to the Worker-Peasant Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams, factory workers who had helped suppress the violent student factions at Tsinghua University. The workers, unfamiliar with the fruit, interpreted it as a profound token of Mao’s personal gratitude and divine favour. Mangoes were paraded, sealed in wax, displayed in glass cases, and even boiled into water that workers ceremonially drank. The mango became a quasi-sacred object, and 'mango worship' swept across China as a unique (and strange) manifestation of the Cultural Revolution’s devotion culture.

Exhibit in the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon - Eugene, Oregon, USA.

Later, replicas of mangoes were mass-produced in wax and porcelain, and mango-themed items flooded Chinese markets—from bedsheets to enamelware. Though the ‘mango cult’ eventually faded, it left a lasting imprint on Chinese cultural memory: a tropical fruit, once symbolizing abundance and sweetness in South Asia, had been reframed into a divine emblem of political loyalty halfway across the world.

Yet even as the mango became imbued with the symbolism of different empires, its imagery persisted and evolved.

mid-17th century, Mango-Shaped Flask, Islamic Art, Met Museum

The distinctive mango shape, which had flourished for centuries in South Asian textiles, jewelry, and folk art, was exported along with fabrics. Through contact with Persian and Kashmiri artisans, the mango motif was stylized into the now-famous paisley pattern—a teardrop-shaped design that captivated the textile industries of Europe. By the 18th and 19th centuries, the paisley had become a fashion craze in Britain and France, a marker of the ‘exotic East’ prized by aristocrats and later bohemian circles in the 1960s and 70s. It remains to date, an abstracted yet perfectly associated symbol of the exotic East, of utopia, of faraway wonder, as the paisley.

19th century, Sheet with overall paisley pattern, decorative paper, Met Museum

The mango’s symbolism shifted with each crossing. What began as a sacred and intimate fruit of the tropics became a fashionable signifier of taste, leisure, and otherness in the world’s imagination. Still, the deeper meanings refused to vanish completely. In diaspora communities, in memory, in South Asian kitchens blooming across cities like London, Toronto, and Melbourne, the mango remained a portal to childhood, to festivals, to the heavy sweetness of a South Asian summer. Recipes travelled too—mango pickles, chutneys, lassis—and with them, stories of migration, resilience, and belonging. Still today, to taste mango is to taste paradise; this has not changed.

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The delight of the mango is not only in the vividness of its taste but also in its exquisite shape, tracing a smiling side of a face or the shape of a drop of liquid. We released the screen-printed poster of a mango to celebrate its visual beauty.

Click to purchase; only a limited number of prints are available.

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How an editorial decision altered a 600 year old festival

Researching commissioned stories, we sometimes come across informational gems. This story—on how the current format of Sri Lanka’s traditional Sinhala and Tamil New Year was shaped by an editorial decision—is based on one such discovery.

Sri Lanka’s traditional Sinhala and Tamil New Year, celebrated in April, is not a calendrical reset. It’s more accurately described as a choreography of land, sky, and communal intention. Celebrated by both Sinhala and Tamil communities, it’s an astrological, agricultural and lifestyle celebration that highlights the hybrid beauty of Sri Lankan culture. Today, the New Year feels timeless, but it is in fact a recent curation—a cultural remix made so by printing technology, political movement, and the pressures of scaling. 

An editorial decision that reshaped culture

The traditional new year, in its earliest form, was a sprawling, many-weeked observance. This oldest form of the festival incorporated ayurvedic practices, environmental sustainability, musical offerings, as much as it drew from prehistoric harvest rituals, indigenous customs, Vedic astrology, and animistic reverence. Throughout the weeks, there were rituals for sound offerings through musical instruments to wake the land and human spirit. There were rituals for saving seeds from the last harvest for the new year. Ceremonial tree planting was a ritual practiced in each household as well as communally, with royal patronage. Ancestors were remembered not through photos but through gestures of charity and visits to ancestral homes and villages. Some regions lit nightlong fires. Others observed absolute silence. But not all of this survived. 

In 1855, Epa Appuhamy set out to print the first local panchaanga litha (almanac) with traditional new year rituals. Epa had to list all the auspicious times practiced in the entire island and print them on a single sheet of paper to keep it affordable to the market. It was impossible. He made a decision. Being a highly experienced astrologer, Epa was confident enough to distill the rituals down to a curated few. It was the beginning of the now iconic Epa almanac that hangs in kitchens to this day. The ‘Epa Panchanga Litha’ went on to become a household name and trusted guide. Epa almanac’s lasting success almost single-handedly reshaped the traditional new year. The rituals that Epa left behind were not necessarily unimportant—only unprintable. Yet, what didn’t make it to print were forgotten and lost to the tides of time. 

The official gazette of Ceylon recognizing Epa alamanc as a printed publication.

When editorial act becomes cultural legacy

Concurrently, Sri Lanka’s nationalist movement did something similar—this time not for layout and marketability, but in the name of unification. Keen to reinvigorate identity under colonial rule, nationalist leaders repopularized the traditional new year. By making it compact, the traditional new year was easily parceled and packaged as part of the national campaign. The rituals were streamlined following Epa’s almanac, leaflets were distributed, and the idea of a national new year tradition was born. The regionally diverse rituals were further compressed or omitted. Unification, while it brought visibility and focus, also brought erasure of diversity. Village-specific customs and rituals got limited to memory, lore, and scholarly articles—if not faded into oblivion.

In 1993, the Ministry of Religious and Cultural Affairs began convening the State Auspicious Committee, consisting of expert astrologers, to prepare and publish the official ritual times for each year. They inherited not just tradition, but Epa’s editorial logic, carrying forward the rituals retained by the Epa almanac. It solidified the long-term influence a single editorial decision had on shaping one of Sri Lanka’s most popular celebrations at a national scale. This shows how what we call ‘tradition’ is, in truth, once a choice made by a mere human, like you and me. 

Does culture shape us or do we shape it?

Understanding the true, evolving nature of our rituals liberates us from false nostalgia. Culture is not a fossil. It's not fixed. It's a living reflection of its people, tools, and arts, as much as its constraints and dreams. How Epa Appuhamy’s editorial decision changed a six-hundred-year-old cultural festival is a reflection of how culture is a living phenomenon shaped by people, their creativity, technology and tools.

Which means we have a choice. If tradition was once rewritten by the printing page size, word counts and a political campaign, then we, too, as living mirrors of our times and the members of current society, are entitled to shape our cultures as we see fit. 

What would you choose to set as culture in a world marked by environmental collapse and the quiet unravelling of natural systems? We are not only witnesses—we are still participants. Culture is not something we inherit untouched; it is something we craft, refine, and carry forward with intention. In this present day of information overwhelm, what rituals should we nurture? As global conflicts, economic disparities, and the ease of the privileged few shape our daily lives and fragile local economies, what gestures of care, protest, or remembrance might we use to meet the challenges of our time? We are called, perhaps urgently so, to ask what new expressions of culture could help us remain human, connected, and awake.

Because either way, the sun will still cross our hypothetical line and enter what we label a ‘new year’, continuing its natural course regardless of our microscopic lives. But the decisions we make today can still set our cultural context for the times to come. It’s worth a shot to use our imagination and conscience to try and mold it for the better.