Short answers, pulled from the story.
A festival is an event celebrated by a community and centering on some characteristic aspect of that community and its religion or cultures. It is often marked as an indigenous or national holiday, a mela, or an Eid. Many festivals are tied to harvest time and end with people eating specially prepared food together.
The word "festival" entered English in the late fourteenth century as an adjective, drawn from Latin by way of Old French. In Middle English, a "festival dai" was a religious holiday, and the first recorded use of "festival" as a noun appears in 1589, spelled "Festifall".
Festivals prospered following the Second World War, and two events established in 1947, the Avignon Festival and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, proved remarkable in shaping the modern model. Art festivals grew more prominent by the turn of the 21st century, and the modern model of music festivals began in the 1960s-70s.
Festivals include religious festivals, arts festivals, and seasonal and harvest festivals. Arts festivals branch into science, literary, music, comedy, rock, jazz, poetry, theatre, film, and food festivals, among others. Their scale ranges from local to national in both location and attendance.
A significant origin of festivals is agricultural, and because food is such an essential resource, many festivals are associated with harvest time. Religious observation and thanksgiving for good harvests are integrated into autumn events, and most festivals culminate in the consumption of specially prepared food.
A feast is a set of celebrations in honour of God or various deities, and "feast" and "festival" are historically interchangeable. The Christian liturgical calendar centers on two principal feasts, the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord, which is Christmas, and the Feast of the Resurrection, which is Easter.
Scholarly literature notes that festivals disseminate political values and meaning, such as ownership of place, and may act as an antique allowing citizens to reach certain ideals of identity and ideology. The public procession of Ganesh Chaturthi was promoted by Bal Gangadhar Tilak to assert a Hindu nationalist identity during the British Raj in India.