Diwali is around the corner. Houses must be bustling with cleaning work in progress, children looking forward to buying firecrackers, women planning the details of Laxmi puja and men helping out with the chores to make sure everything goes smoothly. While I was pondering on the Diwali celebrations, a thought crossed my mind. Is Diwali the same now as it was then, a couple of decades back?
Diwali brings with it happiness in the hearts of the young and the old. We clean our houses to ensure Goddess Laxmi enters our hearth and blesses us and our family with her love and good fortune. We make home-made sweets and savories which add to the excitement of the festival. Given the seasonality of the savories, we would wait whole-heartedly for Diwali to come so that we could enjoy them. How can we forget the firecrackers? The chocolate bombs, rockets, chakris, anars, phuljhari, the snake tablets et al. But looking closely, I find that it is not the same anymore. The reason for it is very simple. All these things that used to make us happy, for which we would wait patiently for an entire year, are now happening throughout the year.
The excitement to buy new clothes on Diwali is lost; because we are buying them every other day, thanks to online shopping and discount bazars everywhere. We no longer gorge on the Diwali sweets, because we fear for our health and wonder what the preservative-laden food is going to do to us. In the land where we get mango drinks beyond summer, the special attraction towards these seasonal desserts is lost. Firecrackers are no more solely a matter of Diwali; weddings, functions, cricket matches alike, all enjoy the series of expensive fireworks throughout the year. Moreover, the first chance we get, we plan to use our hard-earned holidays to escape from the hustle and bustle of the city to some place quiet. There goes with it the idea of decorating your home and celebrating the festival with family, the traditional way.
However, through all this, even if we manage to clean our homes, cook a delicious meal, and pray to the Goddess for health and fortune, social media does not let us spend quality time with our family. We need to continuously communicate through the tiny screen and somehow manage to ignore the actual people appearing in HD right before us.
But this does not mean that all is lost. We are still the same within. We just need to reach in and pull out the innocence and pure joy to the outer surface. The moment we start living in the moment, we will realize the essence of life and the beauty of companionship. We will pay more attention to the people around us, to our friends and family. We will find the peace that we so badly need. Perfection can wait but human bonding cannot.
Diwali is about love, about bonding with family, of celebrating together and lighting up the darkness. This Diwali let’s light up our lives with love, peace, and harmony. We all need it, our country needs it, and at the macro-level the world needs it.
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