Skip to main content

Let the light shine


Diwali is a festival that is sustained by multiple legends.  The people of Ayodhya lined up with lamps in their hands to welcome back Rama and Sita who had destroyed the evil named Ravana.  The return of the Pandavas after their exile used to add sheen to the Diwali diyas.  Krishna’s victory over Narakasura is commemorated in certain parts of India during Diwali.  The emergence of Lakshmi from the cosmic ocean which was churned by both the gods and the demons may shine in some of the Diwali lights. 

The bulk of the universe consists of dark matter.  The 100 billion galaxies each of which may have about 100 billion stars have not dispelled much of the darkness.  Is darkness the essence of the universe?  Is light a diversion granted to the cosmos like the fireflies that come and go in the wildernesses? 

If light was more abundant than darkness, perhaps Diwali would not have been celebrated.  Diwali is a reminder about the preponderance of darkness.  About the need to light up lamps. 

India is now passing through a period when both the light of Diwali and the plurality of its sustaining legends seem to matter more than ever.  When darkness threatens to overpower, Rama, Krishna and the Pandavas have to equip themselves with their lights.  Let their lights shine.  May Diwali become a meaningful festival that transcends the sound and fury of the fireworks. 


Wish you a HAPPY DIWALI.


Written for Indispire Edition 90 #changingdiwali

Comments

  1. I wish such noble souls would've been in existence today! The world is in such dire need of them. Happy Diwali!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Kaliyug is not to be blessed with much nobility!

      Wish you too the joys and blessings of the festival.

      Delete
  2. A terse beautiful post. Diwali wishes to you and family.

    ReplyDelete
  3. A thoughtful and thought-provoking post!

    ReplyDelete
  4. True.....there is more darkness and hence the need for light......Wishing you a very Happy Diwali......:)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Wish you too and your dear ones. Have a joyful festival filled with its real blessings.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...