Skip to main content

Wish you a Green Diwali


I live in a part of India where Diwali is not celebrated at all: a village in Kerala. Most villages in Kerala don’t celebrate the festival. There are many reasons for this. One is that the Hindus of Kerala worship Krishna more than Rama and so the latter’s victory, which is what Diwali is supposed to celebrate, doesn’t mean much to Keralites. Another reason is that Kerala’s beloved Asura king Maveli (Mahabali) is believed to have been sent to Patala by Vamana on this day. Vamana, an incarnation of Vishnu, becomes an enemy of Malayalis by this mythical story. Obviously, his victory, much less Maveli’s vanquishment, is not a cause for celebration in Kerala.

Diwali is celebrated in many cities of the state, however, because of the migrant populations there. Though the Malayali heart cannot pulsate with the Diwali lights and sounds, he/she does not object to anyone celebrating the festival in the state. The Malayali heart is not parochial that way. After all, weren’t Malayalis the first people in the world to democratically elect a Marxist government? They were also probably the first people who welcomed all sorts of religions and gods without any inhibitions. Christianity is supposed to have entered Kerala promptly after Jesus’ death.

Today’s newspapers inform me that Kerala has limited the Diwali fireworks to two hours: from 8 to 10 pm. There are restrictions on the kind of fireworks that can be used: only green crackers. Many states have issued similar orders in tune with the recommendations of the National Green Tribunal.

This new ecological awareness is to be appreciated. I lived more than half of my life in places that celebrated Diwali and I have experienced the excruciating suffocations of the festival. Delhi’s air, which I breathed for nearly 15 years, used to be a dead weight in my lungs during Diwali. When I started living in Delhi (2001), the celebrations used to be all night. Blinding lights and deafening sounds. And unbreathable air. For people like me who lived on Otrivin nasal drops and Asthalin inhalers, Diwali was a curse to be endured.

It is not about the breathing problems of a few individuals like me, however. It is about the planet’s longing to breathe, to survive. In this very month (October), the world witnessed many floods. Over 600 people were killed by floods in Nigeria because of unusual rainfall caused by climate change. 1.3 million people were displaced. 340,000 hectares of land was affected adversely. Australia underwent a similar agony in the same period. Damages amounting to $3.3 billion dollars were incurred due to flash floods. 40% of Thailand’s provinces were inundated too affecting about 450,000 homes. My own state of Kerala keeps getting rains at unexpected intervals nowadays. The climate change is a serious affair which should force us to change the ways we celebrate certain festivals like Diwali.

One of the candles I lit for Diwali in 2008 on the terrace of Sawan Public School's staff quarters, Delhi.

Wish you a Green Diwali.

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pranita a perverted genius

Bulldozer begins its work at Sawan Pranita was a perverted genius. She had Machiavelli’s brain, Octavian’s relentlessness, and Levin’s intellectual calibre. She could have worked wonders if she wanted. She could have created a beautiful world around her. She had the potential. Yet she chose to be a ruthless exterminator. She came to Sawan Public School just to kill it. A religious cult called Radha Soami Satsang Beas [RSSB] had taken over the school from its owner who had never visited the school for over 20 years. This owner, a prominent entrepreneur with a gargantuan ego, had come to the conclusion that the morality of the school’s staff was deviating from the wavelengths determined by him. Moreover, his one foot was inching towards the grave. I was also told that there were some domestic noises which were grating against his patriarchal sensibilities. One holy solution for all these was to hand over the school and its enormous campus (nearly 20 acres of land on the outskirts
12 comments
Read more

Queen of Religion

She looked like Queen Victoria in the latter’s youth but with a snow-white head. She was slim, fair and graceful. She always smiled but the smile had no life. Someone on the campus described it as a “plastic smile.” She was charming by physical appearance. Soon all of us on the Sawan school campus would realise how deceptive appearances were. Queen took over the administration of Sawan school on behalf of her religious cult RSSB [Radha Soami Satsang Beas]. A lot was said about RSSB in the previous post. Its godman Gurinder Singh Dhillon is now 70 years old. I don’t know whether age has mellowed his lust for land and wealth. Even at the age of 64, he was embroiled in a financial scam that led to the fall of two colossal business enterprises, Fortis Healthcare and Religare finance. That was just a couple of years after he had succeeded in making Sawan school vanish without a trace from Delhi which he did for the sake of adding the school’s twenty-odd acres of land to his existing hun
16 comments
Read more

Machiavelli the Reverend

Let us go today , you and I, through certain miasmic streets. Nothing will be quite clear along our way because this journey is through some delusions and illusions. You will meet people wearing holy robes and talking about morality and virtues. Some of them will claim to be god’s men and some will make taller claims. Some of them are just amorphous. Invisible. But omnipotent. You can feel their power around you. On you. Oppressing you. Stifling you. Reverend Machiavelli is one such oppressive power. You will meet Franz Kafka somewhere along the way. Joseph K’s ghost will pass by. Remember Joseph K who was arrested one fine morning for a crime that nobody knew anything about? Neither Joseph nor the men who arrest him know why Joseph K is arrested. The power that keeps Joseph K under arrest is invisible. He cannot get answers to his valid questions from the visible agents of that power. He cannot explain himself to that power. Finally, he is taken to a quarry outside the town wher
19 comments
Read more

Levin the good shepherd

AI-generated image The lost sheep and its redeemer form a pet motif in Christianity. Jesus portrayed himself as a good shepherd many times. He said that the good shepherd will leave his 99 sheep in order to bring the lost sheep back to the fold. When he finds the lost sheep, the shepherd is happier about that one sheep than about the 99, Jesus claimed. He was speaking metaphorically. The lost sheep is the sinner in Jesus’ parable. Sin is a departure from the ‘right’ way. Angels raise a toast in heaven whenever a sinner returns to the ‘right’ path [Luke 15:10]. A lot of Catholic priests I know carry some sort of a Redeemer complex in their souls. They love the sinner so much that they cannot rest until they make the angels of God run for their cups of joy. I have also been fortunate to have one such priest-friend whom I shall call Levin in this post. He has befriended me right from the year 1976 when I was a blundering adolescent and he was just one year older than me. He possesse
8 comments
Read more

Nakulan the Outcast

Nakulan was one of the many tenants of Hevendrea . A professor in the botany department of the North Eastern Hill University, he was a very lovable person. Some sense of inferiority complex that came from his caste status made him scoff the very idea of his lovability. He lived with his wife and three children in one of Heavendrea’s many cottages. When he wanted to have a drink, he would walk over to my hut. We sipped our whiskies and discussed Shillong’s intriguing politics or something of the sort while my cassette player crooned gently in the background. Nakulan was more than ten years my senior by age. He taught a subject which had never aroused my interest at any stage of my life. It made no difference to me whether a leaf was pinnately compound or palmately compound. You don’t need to know about anther and stigma in order to understand a flower. My friend Levin would have ascribed my lack of interest in Nakulan’s subject to my egomania. I always thought that Nakulan lived
15 comments
Read more