So in some places, people are putting on scary decorations and cobwebs and frightening (supposedly) costumes and asking other people for candy and stuff…isn’t that what you do? I dunno. I’ve only seen that stuff in movies and once in real life when I saw a slightly drunken Jack Sparrow with drunken girl pirates that looked a lot like girl pirates from One Piece. Anyway, I don’t celebrate Halloween because India doesn’t get Halloween.
Give away stuff with nothing in return?
Let strangers knock on your door without glaring them to death?
Wasting time in having fun when you could be studying medicine/engineering/architecture and moving out of the country?
It would be a nightmare for most people I’m sure. But we do celebrate a very important festival this month, and that’s Diwali.
Now there’s not a lot of festivals in India that don’t involve grown ups yelling at children to stay quiet and in a corner, there’s just Holi and Diwali that I can think of and that kite flying holiday, so I am very fond of this time of the year.
Yes I need to clean my room table, but that’s a small price to pay. I get so much food everywhere I go and everyone’s in a mostly good mood and everything’s bright and cheerful and I get soo much money.
It’s awesome. And as a kid, another exciting thing was the whole firecracker tradition. I never liked loud ones, but the fuljhadis and anars and chakras were really cool. It was one of the few times that I didn’t absolutely hate everyone outside of my family. For a few hours. The rockets are wonderful as well, but they’ve never worked for me, so we have a love hate relationship. I love them. They laugh at me as they fizzle out and fall down after halfheartedly going up a few feet. That might have something to do with me being a giant wimp and barely touching the wick with the agarbatti (does anybody use anything else to light these types of crackers?)
Obviously, I can no longer enjoy these simple pleasures. The past few years, every-time we had more than 3 days off, we used to go to some forest and live like hermits, away from cell phone and internet coverage, and away from the poisonous fumes of the crackers. Last year however, we were able to stay home for the festival, and we were very excited to finally be able to play with fire again after so long. So when we decided to crush our consciences and go firecracker shopping, light shopping, other stuff shopping and things people do before festivals. I found a few strange things
1. We didn’t know what crackers to buy. Indian firecracker (henceforth referred to as FC) companies have no knowledge of copyright or useless stuff like that, or photoshop for that matter. I saw several pictures of Emily Vancamp, Shakira, Angelina Jolie, Matt Damon and surprisingly enough, Betty White on boxes of FCs. Many of them had the © mark right there in front of the box, sitting there without a care in the world.
2. If a box says there’s going to be one type of FC in it, it doesn’t necessarily have that FC in it. I don’t understand this marketing strategy, but I guess they know better than to go for building trust and confidence in their customers.
3. Safety is never an issue. Because it doesn’t exist. One shop we went to (by shop I mean a shack hastily built up to last through the Diwali week) had nice, fiery lamps burning away happily next to a somber looking stack of uncovered FCs. Nobody saw any problem with that.
4. Customer is always wrong. This actually happened this year, today. My mom went out to buy a string of lights because our last year’s works perfectly fine and all of us are horrible at handling money. When she specifically asked for a plain string without flashy colors, the guy told her she didn’t understand and that it was Diwali and it would look stupid if she had a plain lighting arrangement. When my mom insisted on the plain lights, he gave her a look that plainly said he didn’t think she was too bright and told the shop boy to pick the multi-colored ones after showing mom how pressing a button makes them go all shiny and colorful, slowly.
5. So apparently, electrical connectors are classified as male and female. Quite ingenious actually, but imagine my surprise when I asked for a connector with ‘holes’ (because I had no idea what to call them) and she yelled at the shop boy to give me a female.
“I’m getting a girl? What?” I didn’t get a girl. Thankfully.
In general, people were very upset with my entire family because we were some of the most unenthusiastic, non–jumpy, single colored family apparently, to ever exist. I’m pretty sure I heard an old woman telling some other old woman about the youth of today and how we have no respect for traditions. Thanks old woman. I didn’t hear that at all.
But unfortunately, I realized that we can no longer enjoy polluting the environment with more smoke and dust and explosive powder. Because after I grew up, I developed something known as a HAC or Horribly Annoying Conscience and that HAC does not let me enjoy polluting stuff. At all. I feel guilty when people around me go around bursting FCs. And since I was never a fan of loud sounds (unless those sounds are coming from my headphones), I don’t think I’m missing out. The other and more effective reason is my dog.
See, if we’d just told people that we actually give a fuck about the environment, we would be laughed at, dragged to the center of the FC bursting group and forced to light the most polluting, loudest FC they could get their hands on to punish us for uttering such blasphemous words. Do we not know that bursting FC’s during Diwali has been going on since time immemorial (not true since FCs are a Chinese invention) and that by not increasing the possibility of burning the entire area to the ground, we are dishonoring our traditions? We wouldn’t have had much of a choice in that.
But now that we have a dog, we can in fact go around telling people to stop. It’s a genuine reason and that reason is that FCs hurt my ears like hell and everyone seems unanimous on the point that my senses have dulled to the point of non-existence due to the internet (it’s always the internet). If my dull ears hurt, my dog’s ears must be figuratively exploding. It’s horrible to watch him cuddle up against mom and force us all into one room so that he can keep an eye on all of us at once.
So I no longer use FCs and neither can people around me, and five years down the line when everyone’s gasping for oxygen and dying, the air around my house will still be pure and breathable.
And I hope that the air around your house or wherever you live will also be breathable. Firecrackers aren’t funny to dogs and cats, many of which die during Diwali because of the noise and smoke. Birds also have heart attacks and die. In general, a beautiful festival ends up with having to sweep the bodies of many creatures off the roads to make way for the next night’s victims.
Happy Diwali!!
And a smoke free one. 🙂
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