Running With Scissors

Last week was Diwali.  As you may remember from last year’s explanation, Diwali is the ultimate holiday in India along the lines of Christmas and New Years combined into one night of celebration.  It is quite the spectacle.  You may also remember from last year’s blog entry, I was awash with newness and naiveté when it came to India, so in my description of the holiday, I may have missed out on a couple points that I now find salient.

Diwali is the quintessential Indian Holiday.  Being an absolutely materialist driven society, Diwali fits perfectly as it is entirely geared for gaining prosperity for the individuals and families of India.  Unlike Christmas, which has roots in charity and giving, Diwali makes no pretense about this.  In true Indian fashion, it is simply about greed!

The idea behind the holiday is that the god of wealth, Lakshami, visits your house on the night of Diwali and bestows upon you prosperity for the upcoming year.  Not peace for all mankind; not food for the poor; not even prosperity for the general population - she grants it to you and you alone.  Now obviously, she cannot give everyone this gift, so you spend the few days leading up to Diwali doing things that will gain you favor with this god.

Firstly, you must buy gold and silver.  Luckily, to facilitate this, there is a day designated as auspicious to buy these metals.  During this selected day, the population floods the jewelers like sailors to free booze spending a large percentage of their savings on gaudy gold bangles, necklaces and other assorted pieces of jewelry.  The markets are clogged with consumers and traffic around the most popular shopping areas is completely gridlocked.  I actually believe that, for Jewelers, this day is their actual Diwali, because they are able to make on one day what they make the rest of the year.  Now that is prosperity delivered with a bow!

Secondly, you must decorate your house.  This consists of stringing huge quantities of lights up and down the façade of your home, apartment building, etc, again not unlike Christmas.  They must be bright and bold, but unlike Christmas, there is no color coordination, so the overall effect feels less like a festival and more like someone recreated your neighborhood on a light-bright!  Just to add to the confusion, the need for Indians to display their wealth causes them to over-decorate their homes to show their neighbors how important they are.  This turns the more affluent neighborhoods from quiet, conservative places into looking like a huge, outdoor Philippino strip bar.  What could be more festive than that!

Lastly, and most importantly, you must light off fireworks.  This, apparently, is essential to attracting the favor of the gods.  The rockets take to the air with screams, bangs and booms even before it gets darks sending loud burst into the sky.  But this is not like New Years or the 4^th of July in which coordinated firework shows are punctuated with a few homegrown launches. This is 1.5 billion people armed to the teeth with every type of firework made in Asia randomly setting them off throughout the entire night.  These are people who walk out into a highway never acknowledging the danger of being hit by a 2–ton truck lighting off explosives and, worst yet, encouraging their small children to do the same. It is truly like running with scissors – eventually someone will get hurt … and they do.

As with any Chinese-made, $1.00 item, there are bound to be some misfires and, in this case, these misfires take off people’s hands and blind them, but what the heck, it is a holiday!  As well, with fireworks streaking up, down and sideways, the person launching is not the only potential victim.  You are regaled the next day with stories of starbursts being shot into washing machines (many people have their appliance on their back porch) and exploding, garbage surrounding homes being set ablaze and people getting shot with roman candles and other high-velocity fireworks.  In a country in which personal accountability is low and strategic thinking is virtually non-existent, it is truly remarkable that entire cities are not wiped out on this night. 

In the end, my wife and I barricaded ourselves in our apartment and listened to the booms and screeches until finally drifting off into a shallow sleep – always keeping one ear open for the fire alarm.