MUMBAI - Like
stars in a tropical evening, the Diwali festive "feel"
started flickering across Mumbai streets ahead of the
official starting day on Friday: traditional earthen
wick lamps, pink, green, blue, orange multi-colored
string lights in the Andheri market, firecracker stalls
in Bandra Hill, decorated shops with jostling crowds in
Dadar, mounds of sweet boxes outside the American Dry
Fruits store in Flora Fountain, "festive sale" notices
in shopping malls and the two-decades long firecracker
accident warnings from the Mumbai-based Loss Prevention
Association of India.
Accidents and Diwali are
inseparable. In Srikakulam town, 750 kilometers from
Hyderabad city, on November 4, a firecracker blast
killed five people and injured 12. Bapi Raju, a trader,
had stored firecrackers at home and the accidental blast
fully demolished his house and two neighboring
buildings.
These years, India's most popular
festival also comes attached with cheaper China-made
alternatives from lamps to electronics eating into the
seasonal retail boom, sound and air pollution debates,
police cautions and vows for an eco-friendly Diwali.
Talk of an "eco-friendly Diwali" was as common
as Saddam Hussein fan clubs in Texas during the days
when the French-speaking Rajiv Kaul was doing his
O-levels in Cambridge in the 1970s. Back home, Kaul did
what almost every other Indian boy did during Diwali
holidays. Being with family, decorating his home in the
Himalayan town of Dehradun, placing empty tin cans over
firecracker "bombs" and gloating at the demonic bang
that returned twisted, smoking metal back to earth.
Now 46-years old, sporting a smartly cut dark
suit and red tie as general manager of the historic Taj
Mahal Palace in Mumbai, Kaul mildly gears up for
increased corporate gifting orders from the hotel's
Birdy's pastry shop (custom-made chocolates are a big
hit), busier restaurants and coping with slack room
sales.
"Diwali signifies a slow period in our
busy winter season," says Kaul, also a vice president of
the Taj Group, India's largest luxury hotel chain.
"After all, Diwali means more of family reunions at home
and less of business travel." So the Taj staff
traditionally gets treated to a special festive lunch
and dinner as some compensation for being away from
family.
At the rival Oberoi Towers, part of
India's other premier hotel chain, Oberoi, whose
eight-property operations in Egypt Rajiv Kaul led until
a year ago, Diwali will be greeted more enthusiastically
with festive decorations across the hotel such as
rangolis or kolams (elaborate, colored
flower-like handmade designs on the floor) in the lobby
entrances and special room packages.
As a
festival, Diwali or Deepavali (meaning "rows of lights"
in the ancient Indian Sanskrit language) has changed in
a generation. To Indians who can afford the festivities,
the five Diwali days generally mean thunder crashes of
firecrackers, the flash of a million lights at night,
family reunions, pre-dawn oil baths, new clothes,
overworked tummies reeling with too many varieties of
pure ghee-based sweets and flour-based deep-fried
savories.
The "rows of lights" tradition comes
from lighting little earthen oil lamps (called
diyas in Hindi) in rows around homes, on walls,
courtyards, floors, verandahs, garden pedestals, window
sills and making a wonderfully pretty picture at night.
The lamps, mythology says, guide the Goddess of
Wealth Laxmi into homes. Diwali also celebrates the
return of crown prince Rama and Sita to Rama's kingdom
of Ayodhya after 14 years of exile. But it means
different things across India. In West Bengal, Diwali is
linked with goddess Kali and her knocking the demon boss
Narakasura permanently out of business. But all across
this diverse nation, Diwali celebrates the resurgence of
life and hope, victory of good over evil, welcoming the
Indian winter and the start of the sowing season.
Diwali is also a punter's licensed delight.
Legend cleverly says Goddess Parvati played dice with
her husband Shiva during a Diwali day and so anyone who
gambles on Diwali night gets lucky all year long. Stock
markets are open for a special Diwali trading evening.
In 2004, India presents a different Diwali.
Traditional earthen clay and cotton wicker oil lamps
give way to the Chinese invasion of the Indian consumer
country. Cheaper and more colorful Chinese electric
lights dominate the market of traditional Diwali
diyas and candles. Business is not always so good
for everybody.
Bespectacled, potbellied Amar
Chedda, proprietor of Peaches, a greeting cards and gift
articles shop in Churchgate, has hung maroon-gold Diwali
decorations, has a "Happy Diwali" sign flashing from his
computer screen saver, and placed tables of greeting
cards in the road outside his glass door. But he
muttered glumly while counting a thick wad of Rs 500
(US$11) notes: "Business is on a downward swing by 10%
every year. People have more money to spend, but the
business is spreading horizontally, not vertically.
People are spending more on mobile phones etc." And not
so much on greeting cards, Chedda's staple business
diet.
Diwali now also means a 125-decibel limit
for firecrackers, debates of child labor in the
hazardous firecracker industry and the annual Diwali
bonus disputes of municipal corporations with trade
unions threatening to shut down cities.
On the
environmental battle front, Delhi police have this year
strictly ordered that crackers above 125 decibels will
be banned. For the first time ever, cracker packets must
reveal their decibel levels. The West Bengal state
education minister Kanti Biswas went further. He plans
to send a circular directing teachers to tell students
that firecrackers should be banned, and that violators
will be punished.
Biswas might have been sounded
like an alien monster to kids in the 1970s, whose Diwali
day began at around 4.30am with a diabolical blast of
"Red Fort" crackers that burst non-stop for five to 15
minutes, a mere preliminary to making the city sound
like it was earnestly waging urban warfare all day long.
Irrepressible mischief of kids was part of
Diwali. One of this correspondent's childhood Diwali
memories in the mid-1970s was of carefully lobbing small
firecrackers through the window of the neighbor's
bathroom, with friend Keshav Das as accessory to the
crime. When Neelima Bhatt, the young daughter of the
house under attack, plaintively squealed: "Boys,
pleasing stop throwing crackers into the bathroom," we
cracked up like two demented hyenas. Ten-year-olds, as
readers of Richmal Crompton's William books would
testify, have a peculiar sense of humor, and Diwali
sharpened it.
Firecrackers are to Diwali what a
Christmas tree is to Christmas. A leading firecracker
factory advertised for Diwali this year, with its wares
sounding like a shopping list for George W Bush's
idiotic assault on Fallujah town: "Rockets &
Missiles, Tubes, Mines, Shells, Helicopters, Planes
& UFOs, Sparklers, Novelties & Aerials display,
Parachutes, Racers, Tanks, Smoke & Snakes, Power
ropes, and more ..."
But Diwali will be less
noisy and polluting this year, the All-India Federation
of Fireworks Association promised the media on November
5. It said that the 800-odd firecracker manufacturing
units in India would follow the 125-decibel norm
prescribed by the government-appointed National Sound
Level Committee, including factories around Sivakasi
town that produces over 80% of India's fireworks.
Sivakasi, with almost its entire population
depending on the fireworks industry, has for long been
in the eye of the storm for employing around 20,000
children in hazardous conditions making firecrackers.
Firecracker factories claim they no longer employ
children.
But child labor is one of the reasons
why some enlightened urban school kids have decided to
say "no" to firecrackers. Silent Diwali nights might be
a reality sooner than later, a happy prospect for adults
who were once juvenile masterminds of sound pollution.
Raja M is an independent writer based
in Mumbai, India.
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Nov 12, 2004
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