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?