A family’s rickshaw ride under the fairy lights that transform the streets of Kolkata into a magical mystery tour during Durga Puja has gone “viral” on the internet as a snapshot of happiness.
The video, in which the mother is nudged to sing a catchy Bengali Pujo song amid the son’s infectious laughter while the father shoots with a smile, has won many hearts with comments like “Bro won at life” and “This is what happiness looks like.”
Abhishek Mukherjee, however, simply wanted to document a moment for his child during Durga Puja that he could look back to.
“I’ve been born and brought up in a very middle-class family in Bengal. So in my own childhood days, I would hold hands of my mom and dad and go roam around, see the Durga Pujas. And now as parents, we want to do the same with our child,” Mukherjee, who works as a chartered accountant with CESC, told My Kolkata.
He and his wife, Priyanka, wanted to recreate that experience for their child, taking a rickshaw through the neighbourhood to visit Pujo pandals on Maha Saptami and recording the moment as a memory to look back on. And he uploaded it to Facebook and Instagram.
Soon, it was being shared by hundreds.
“I did nothing extraordinary to go viral. It was just a regular video. We did not take our car because it is difficult to move around the city during the festive season. We took a rickshaw. Maybe it reminded people of the simple joys of life that they don’t see online,” said Mukherjee.
Overwhelmed with the storm of attention, Mukherjee took down the video from social media. But by then it was everywhere. The clip even caught the attention of Sanjiv Goenka, chairman of the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group, who shared it on X.
The video’s appeal, Mukherjee believes, lies in the memories it stirred among people who have grown up with similar experiences but now live far from home.
“Many people watched the video and were immediately reminded of their own childhood,” he said, pointing to how the clip may have brought back memories of childhood, family and the festivities back home.
Someone from Dresden, Germany messaged him to say that the video had struck the right chord.
Mukherjee and his wife, who is a teacher, are overwhelmed by the emotional response to the video, although their son is too young to understand any of it.
Their friends, meanwhile, are more excited about the sudden attention than he is.
“My friends are sharing screenshots of the reposts by important people. I truly never thought the response would be this,” Mukherjee said.
Asked what he would tell younger people caught up in the pursuit of extraordinary experiences, he emphasised that happiness means different things to different people.
“Do what makes you happy. But there is one golden rule: don’t try to be too extraordinary or don’t try to push everything very hard at it,” he said.