Skip to main content

No Diwali here


One of the flames
that fluttered
on our terrace in Delhi
in a Diwali night
It’s only when the greetings came via Whatsapp that I realised it was Diwali.  Saturday is a holiday anyway and I used it for completing the works set aside for the day as usual.  The work took me to two towns on either side of my village.  There was nothing in either of the towns to remind one of Diwali.  It was business as usual.  Not even an extra lamp was seen anywhere.  No diyas which were ubiquitous in Delhi where I lived a decade and a half before I chose the quietness of this village.  No crackers which the Delhiites insisted on calling ‘bombs’ – “bum,” in fact.  

No, I don’t miss the diyas or the bums. I like this quietness.  I love the purity that wafts into my lungs.  I used to conceal myself at home during both Diwali and Holi while I was in Delhi.  Both these festivals are conspicuous by their absence in Kerala except maybe in the big cities where people from other states celebrate them.

Another memory 
That makes me think of the diversity which marks India.  Half of Kerala’s population is Hindu.  But they don’t celebrate the two festivals which hold much charm for their counterparts in other parts of the country.  Perhaps, BJP will import the festivals soon just as it has already imported gau mata.  Beef has all but disappeared from the state.  Probably the Malayali health-consciousness has more to do with that than BJP. 

While I sit and enjoy the quietness that distils through the night air from a sky stippled with twinkling stars, let me wish HAPPY DIWALI to my friends in less silent places.  Let me also reassure them that though we don’t have the Diwali bums here, we have all the political bums – a whole array of scams and scandals as raucous as they can get.


Labels:

Comments

  1. AnonymousOctober 30, 2016 at 1:13 AM

    Political Bums! Haha that's sure not miss.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 30, 2016 at 6:23 AM

      Our Babu's and Mani's can give the Yadavs of UP and Bihar a run for their money.

      Delete
  2. tyatinOctober 30, 2016 at 10:14 AM

    Political bums ...good one

    ReplyDelete
  3. EJNovember 2, 2016 at 12:31 PM

    I didn't realize what a big deal Diwali & Dusserha was until I reached Bangalore. I had been to Bombay few years back, so knew that the Ganesha Visargan festival was huge.

    If we wait few years, we will see the evolution of these festivals in Kerala. That is what I think. Then that serene beauty of lit diyas decorating our temples and households will be a story to tell our next generation, replaced by the boom of the firecrackers and the noise.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 3, 2016 at 9:24 PM

      Yes, there's a high probability of certain varieties of pollution hitting Kerala soon.

      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
47 comments
Read more

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...
18 comments
Read more

The Vegetarian

Book Review Title: The Vegetarian Author: Han Kang Translator: Deborah Smith [from Korean] Publisher: Granta, London, 2018 Pages: 183 Insanity can provide infinite opportunities to a novelist. The protagonist of Nobel laureate Han Kang’s Booker-winner novel, The Vegetarian , thinks of herself as a tree. One can argue with ample logic and conviction that trees are far better than humans. “Trees are like brothers and sisters,” Yeong-hye, the protagonist, says. She identifies herself with the trees and turns vegetarian one day. Worse, she gives up all food eventually. Of course, she ends up in a mental hospital. The Vegetarian tells Yeong-hye’s tragic story on the surface. Below that surface, it raises too many questions that leave us pondering deeply. What does it mean to be human? Must humanity always entail violence? Is madness a form of truth, a more profound truth than sanity’s wisdom? In the disturbing world of this novel, trees represent peace, stillness, and nonviol...
6 comments
Read more

The RSS does not exist

An organisation that has 80,000 branches in India does not exist legally in any document. This is the cover story of The Caravan this month. By the way, The Caravan is one of the very few publications that still continues to exist in spite of being overtly critical of Narendra Modi and his Sangh Parivar. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is not registered as an organisation under any of the usual Indian registration laws such as the Societies Registration Act or as a trust or company. It functions as an unregistered voluntary organisation, though it is arguably the largest public organisation in the country. This situation makes the organisation absolutely unaccountable to anyone, argues The Caravan . The RSS is not legally required to file annual returns to the Tax department or disclose its financial details publicly though it deals with thousands of crores of rupees every year especially after Modi became the Prime Minister of the country. The membership of the organisat...
12 comments
Read more

No Problems Only Opportunities

You’ve probably heard this joke. A young man walked into his office one morning and found a beautiful young lady sitting in his chair. He called the MD and said, “Sir, I have a problem.” The MD replied, “Don’t you know our company’s motto, young man? No Problems, Only Opportunities .” When Suchita of The Blogchatter sent me a mail with the topic of this week’s blog hop –  - the first thing that came to my mind was the above joke. I know many people – too many, in fact – who went through terrible problems. My own life was a series of problems in none of which was there the consolation of any beautiful woman. One essential lesson I learnt from life is that life is a series of problems. You solve one and then arises the next one. Now I have reached an age when problems are no more problems: they are life itself. If you ask me what was the biggest problem I ever dealt with, it was my last years in Shillong. I was a lecturer in a college drawing a fat salary stipulated by the U...
13 comments
Read more