Last week was Diwali here in India. This is the biggest holiday in a country that has 1000 gods and a holiday for each of them. It is basically the combination of Christmas, New Years and the 4th of July all culminating in one hell-raising night! Diwali technically is 5 days and is referred to as the festival of lights. As with almost all Hindu holidays, it celebrates the triumph of good over evil and in some way celebration of said triumph will lead to prosperity. This specific celebration commemorates the return of Lord Rama along with Sita and Lakshman from their fourteen-year-long exile and the vanquishing the demon-king Ravana. To celebrate the victory and the return of their king the people illuminated the kingdom with earthen oil lamps and lit fireworks.
Like any good modern interpretation of a holiday, this celebration has been hijacked by the retail industry and has transmogrified into a commercial bonanza. Christmas in the US is bad, but image 1 billion people trying to do their last minute shopping. I can tell you that you have never seen anything like it. It is best just to stay indoors and hide in the weeks leading up to Diwali.
The other aspect of Diwali is the illumination piece. Like Christmas, houses are decorated with loads of string lights in all sorts of colors. They drape from every building and every house and the amount of lights shows, in some manner, your economic level. Some are thoughtfully placed, but most hang from the buildings in straight lines like bars on a jail cell. Overall, though, the impact is nice and it breaks up the usual concrete jungle of Delhi.
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| Lights in the Neighborhood (You will have to excuse the dirty lens) |
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| Our Building! |
The second part of the illumination is the fireworks. For this, I was unprepared. Fireworks are plentiful, cheap and unregulated in India and although they are used liberally throughout the year for various holidays, it is only on Diwali that the 1 billion souls fire their accumulated arsenal at the same time. In Delhi, we have an unofficial population of roughly 18 million and I can tell you that each and every Delhite spent a month’s salary on explosives.
Just after sundown the thunderous sound of roman candles and firecracker begins. This slowly builds through the night until the people of Delhi unleash the big guns of starbursts, M250s and fire-spewing, spinney things that, I'm guessing, are outlawed in any country not looking to reduce it's citizenry by incineration. Things that would only be available to professionally licensed experts, and some that would not, are being ignited by 12 year olds in the streets while the intoxicated parents proudly look on. For 10 hours, these heart-thumping, explosions continued without pause on the arid streets of Delhi. I now know how Saddam Hussein must have felt on the first night of "Shock and Awe" - although my guess is that the battering he took was quieter and less dangerous to the general population.
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| The fire-spewing, spinney thing. This is taken from the roof (6 floors up) and is looking down the street about 200 yards. No fire hazard here! |
In the morning, the entire city was blanketed with an after-battle haze and the smell of used gunpowder. Used ordinances littered the streets with their brightly colored wrappers singed and torn from the night’s festivities. Usually, the trash-covered streets of Delhi have a homogeneously gray tone to them, but apparently Diwali brightens up even this aspect of Indian life.
All in all, it was interesting night. Olga and I, though, are a little shell-shocked and will be entering treatment for battlefield trauma.
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