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

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...
16 comments
Read more

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...
47 comments
Read more

Why do good to others?

Courtesy: polyp.org.uk “Most people would rather die than think and most people do,” said Bertrand Russell in his characteristic witty way.   Professor of Philosophy and author of many books, A C Grayling, is of the opinion that religion has continued to survive even in today’s scientific world because people don’t want to think.   They would rather accept readymade answers given by religion.   God is the ultimate readymade answer for a whole lot of problems.   And a very easy answer too. If we really think and evolve our own moral systems instead of borrowing them from religion, we will be far better human beings, says Grayling in his latest book, The God Argument.   If we think sensibly (common sense would do if we cared to use that faculty), we will realise that we all have a duty to contribute to the welfare of the entire human species.   The simple logic is that when the species is “flourishing” (Grayling’s word) we too flourish.   ...
33 comments
Read more

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...
30 comments
Read more

The Call of Islamic State

A year ago, the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague (ICCT) reported that about 4000 people from the West left their homes and countries to join the Islamic State (IS).  Many of them are women.  The reporters had made a special study of the women who joined the terrorist outfit and found that it was difficult to categorise which type of women were particularly drawn to IS. “While most of the girls are young, some as young as fifteen,” says the report,  “there are also mothers with young children who make the trip. Some of the girls have difficulties in school and are said to have an IQ below average,  but there are also women who are highly educated. It also appears that even though a relatively large portion of the girls had (or still have) a troubled childhood, there are some who come from families with no known problems with the authorities. Most of the girls come from religiously moderate Muslim families,  yet some converted to Islam a...
33 comments
Read more