Thoughts on diwali

Being an Indian, it might be the hardest thing to study India with a beedy eye.

Today, I am going to tell you about something as mundane (or as exotic) as my diwali.

Every year, on Diwali, my parents, who are not particularly or at all religious, say a lot of prayers in the morning. Later, we drive all the way to my father's office (which is a good 20 kilometres south from where we live) to do the prayers over there. We have lunch outside, maybe somewhere expensive, come back home, and in the evening, we go to my grandparents place, which is in the north of Mumbai (another 20 kilometres north of where we stay) and have dinner with them, and sometimes even say more prayers with them.

In total, we travel about 80 kilometres within the same city to:

1. Fulfill a bunch of rituals that make little sense.
2. Eat a tonne of sweets.
3. Have an expensive lunch in-between at maybe a 5 star restaurant.
4. Meet my grandparents. (And get diwali money! - most elders just hand out notes of hundreds all day)
5. Perform rituals/ prayers to a certain "Laxmi mata" who is basically the goddess of money
6. Eat a rich, traditional dinner.

I don't know if that's how all other Indians celebrate their diwali. Clearly they don't. But for me, that is how it goes.

General things to note about diwali:

1."Saying prayers" is a loose term. It would be more accurate to say that we stand in front of a couple of miniature idols with flower petals thrown all around them and then we make a fire on a plate and chant a monotonous chant with a repetitive tune that gets stuck in one'es head, and makes absolutely no sense to anyone's living memory about the greatness of Lakshmi.

2. Wearing appropriate clothes can mean anything from wearing "new" clothes on diwali to wearing a salwar kameez or even a saree. This diwali, the fact that I wore a saree in order to follow a more tradition path, made me stand out quite a lot and subsequently a lot of my relatives thought I was either (a) married, (b) going to be married soon, or (c) fantastically into Indian culture and hence not so "Westernised".

3. On diwali, we do lakshmi pooja. Lakshmi is the goddess of money and abundance. So basically we are praying to money and praying for our own prosperity, which is quite far from selfless. Interestingly, my family bought a new car this diwali, and like all Indians, thought to pray to the car after we bought it on the day of Dhanteras. I still do not understand why Indians do this. In addition to cars, we pray to new houses and sometimes even family desktops when they're newly bought.

4. Overall, I noticed that this year is that advertising has finally bought over diwali, and, like Christmas, it reigns over all sorts of hoardings, radio shows and TV ads more than ever before. In Ahmedabad, one sees a particular ad ubitquitously that says "LOSE YOUR BELLY BEFORE DIWALI". It's been there since the end of September, when I arrived in Ahmedabad.

5. It must be said that sometimes the express purpose of celebrating diwali, or any Indian festival, gets a bit lost in the number of rituals and other demands it makes of us. The bursting of firecrackers, although a comparatively recent addition than diyas to the rituals of diwali, do more harm than good. Besides, I now know of electric diyas. Overall, diwali gets a bit more uneco-friendly every year and that concerns me.

6. In spite of all this, I stills see diwali as a way to take a break from all our lives and spend some time getting to know family. If only there were ways to make the experience more authentic, the connection with people deeper and the spirit of help or togetherness more conscious, there would be a lot more validity to what we do.

As my ending note I'd like to say that I'm interested in "designing" a culture or a thought-process/ attitude around diwali (such as is often enough propagated by the ads and hoardings) that convey a spirit of awareness, helping and consciousness. When you team this with family and the annual vacation, it could to wonders to Indian people and the Indian tussle between Western and Internal identity as a whole. Thoughts?

Seeing India Being Indian

How do we begin to ask the right questions about India?

Even for me as an Indian, to hazard a sentence that tries to sum up India is something I do with reluctance.

I cannot fairly define the "India I know" because there is nothing I can compare it with - so on what basis would I be defining it?

My classmates looked at me with curious troubled eyes when we were talking about the abuses and killings of women WRT dowry today, and I couldn't reassure them that it is something that I am completely safe from without sounding like I'm getting ahead of myself. My parents are pretty liberal, except when they're not. I've never been stalked or followed, except for that one time.
Nothing is true about safety in India; everything is a matter of a labyrinthine chance. To say I've never been at risk would be silly, but to say that I have is to blame my parents or teachers or watchmen or someone else perfectly good-willed for not doing their job of protecting me. And they're not to blame.

Perhaps one thing that perhaps will always work for me as an Indian is keeping each person's best interests at heart and to make sure to strike a personal connection with them. I've noticed that nobody is likely to hurt you if they truly consider you their friend. Trust is a deeper currency, and being able to rely on each other is all people seek in this otherwise structureless chockablock chaos that is our "system". People are the only system here.

Well, even if that's not true (in the spirit that every definition's of opposite is also true, as Tharoor said), we learn to live with the risks, laugh at the dangers, make sardonic comments on the rape statistics or the female ratio, and we (as women) get by.

Since there is no other life we have known, there is no reason to feel sorry for oneself.

OH look - I've done exactly what I set out not to do. I've tried to sum up India.