Celebrating Deepawali

When I look back to my childhood, no festival holds as much fascination as Diwali. Diwali meant getting new clothes—not just any clothes, but the year’s best clothes we could later wear to parties, marriages and the like. Diwali was the time the market would be flooded with new varieties of dresses; and for weeks after Diwali, people would be showing off their new acquisitions with pride.
 
As children we knew Diwali was near when makeshift shacks appeared at every nook on the streets carrying the latest variety of firework crackers with fancy names. By law, these days the shopkeepers have to obtain license for selling crackers, and they can start selling it just a few days prior to Diwali at designated open grounds. This has become necessary to avoid accidental fires.

So, let’s get back to the narration. As children, we would safe-keep our share of the apportioned lot; but then the excitement would get the better of us, and we would use off quite a chunk of the crackers before diwali itself.

Boy Playing with a Sparkler — Image by © Ken Seet/Corbis

Little girls would play with sparklers, ‘bhoomi chakras’ or the whorling disks of firework on the ground, or the colorful fire fountains. The boys would be, of course, more daring. They would devise their own rockets, using bottles, cans and what not — something like what the following video shows. Naturally, these sort of improvisations made it a lot more fun than buying the ready-to-use rockets.

In North India, people would light up crackers after the sunset, but in the South, Diwali starts before the crack of the dawn. As a South Indian, we would get up very early in the morning. Our mothers would massage our heads with warm herbal sesame oil and give us the traditional oil bath. After this, we would burst the crackers. We would always compete with the neighboring kids to see who would burst the crackers first in the morning. After the crackers, it  would be time for a very special breakfast with specially prepared sweets and savories. Oh no, before this we must have our ‘lehyam’, which is a jaggery and honey laden concoction of medicinal herbs that would fire up the digestion to take in all the sweets that would come throughout the day.
 
The main aim of the festivals is to bring the community together. That’s the time one renews ties with old friends, neighbors and acquaintances. So, later in the afternoon and the evening, people would visit each other and exchange gifts and sweets.

From picasa

Diwali, the festival of lights, is celebrated during the seventh month of the Hindu Lunar calendar. (This year, it is on 16-17 October). Rows of lamps or clay pots with oil-soaked wicks are lit to symbolize this triumph of inner light and virtue over the darkness of ignorance and vice.

People line windows and doorways with lamps (’deep’ – Deepawali thus means a row of lamps). Those in business worship Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth. They close their fiscal year and open new account books.

This is how a typical street would look on the Diwali night.

Indians who have settled abroad celebrate with the same zest, but choose the nearest weekend to assemble and have a great cultural evening of music, dance and lights.