Happy Diwali! And I hope you don’t die.

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. 🙂

Driving at night with the headlights on

You know how we are taught to fear snakes at night and to not go out alone because of creeps around or how to stay away from rabid looking dogs? I have an addition to the list. Insects.

 

FEAR THE REAL KILLER

It is estimated that there are about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 insects living today. That’s right, a Quintilian insects. It is said that about 53 people die each year because of an allergic reaction from being stung. I was also looking for the number of people that die because of poisonous insect bites, but Google is being surprisingly unhelpful right now. Let’s just assume the number is in millions.

Why the sudden interest in insects?

I just came back from class, and the language I was using wasn’t exactly something I would normally let people hear from me. I pride myself on usually not swearing, but seriously, some things are just poking you, waiting for you to burst. Like a person tapping their feet loudly for hours on end, or insects jumping down your shirt.

Firstly, it’s around 7 PM right now, so it’s evening and I know I shoud’ve expected to be thoroughly molested by insects the second I stepped out of the house, but I didn’t. I was hoping the “Do good and good things will happen to you” thing will work out, but it didn’t. That’s the last time I switch off the lights when I leave the room now. So I was unpleasantly surprised when a moth decided to sky dive right into my hair the moment I stepped out if the house. I let it find it’s way out of the jungle it found itself in and moved on.

On the way, there was a big bug (I don’t know which one, and I don’t care) who decided to nest on my face and didn’t move for at least 200 meters until I stopped driving and took it off. It seemed reluctant, and it broke my heart, but I knew I had to set it free. But that wasn’t the end of my buggy adventures

Two minutes more and a couple of insects decide they need privacy, so they hide themselves from the prying eyes of the big bad world…in my shirt. Not Cool. The worst thing was, I was at a petrol station and couldn’t even stick my hand down my shirt to drag the presumably happy couple out. I don’t even want to think of the things they did in there…:shudder:

So after my silly little moped (yes, I drive a two wheeler.I don’t drive a car because I am too lazy to learn to drive one. Also, if I did learn, how would I get to meet so many interesting people from the insect family?) was filled up. I decided to make a dash for the class I was already late to, killing a couple of suicidal butterflies along the way (what were they doing out at 6:30 anyway?). I reached and happy story, the class was cancelled.

After muttering a few choice curses under my breath, I was on my way back home. I already knew no one was going to believe my reason for coming home early and that had already pissed me off when out of no where, a stupid whale sized moth decided to collide against my fucking face. It was large enough to make me pull on my brakes like my dog pulls on his leash and stop to see if I’d killed it. I hadn’t. The fuck up made a car nearly bang into me at 500 kmph and it didn’t even have the decency to at least fly a little slowly. Nope. It was all like

“Haha..this was my revenge for you killing a couple of my brethren on your way here..haha…you nearly died!!”

Well here’s the thing, moth, your idiotic brethren were dumb enough to fly around in front of my vehicle like a couple of bollywood actors running around in the woods. But woods don’t have vehicles,so the actors don’t die (shame, really). But the moth wasn’t having any of that, and after it tried to suicide bomb itself onto my face a few more times, I decided to get the hell out of there. Also, the two insects were still doing the nasty down my shirt, so I wanted to get out of it as fast as possible.

And as I was going my way, angry, violated and on the verge of breaking down, another insect (no doubt an accomplice of giant-whale-sized-moth) decided to creep into my helmet (yes I wear a helmet. I ARR SAFTY GURL!!!) and crawl towards my ear.

Now anyone who’s ever been stuck in slow moving traffic will know how difficult it is to do anything else but drive in that situation. The traffic’s slow, so you will take longer than usual to get wherever you’re going, but it’s still freaking moving so you don’t have even half a free hand to do anything else. Now if you can put yourself in that situation, I’d like to add a few challenges.

Imagine there’s a couple of insects in your shirt, not the whole “I’ve got butterflies in my stomach” crap, real actual insects OVER your stomach, doing god knows what things to each other in there,

Imagine you can still feel a giant ass moth landing on your face.

Imagine the uncomfortableness of a helmet and

Imagine an insect crawling under said helmet into your ears, all at the same time.

You will weep.

I almost did, but some very nice guy told me to move my fat ass along and so I didn’t.

Obviously, the first thing I did when I finally parked outside my house was to remove my helmet and vigorously push that insect deeper inside my ear, probably making it easier for giant ass moth to monitor my movement through telepathic convos with ear canal insect. So when my helmet-less head entered the house almost two hours earlier than expected, people were not pleased. At all. Nice family, mine.

So yeah, that was my evening went. Wild, I know. What about you?