Festivals Galore

allsmiles | 20 November, 2004 03:18

Just dunno whats about the festivals this year. Its resulted in two pretty long weekends in a very short span of time. And I have not been able to figure out if thats a good thing or a bad thing. Leaves me a little dis-oriented and dislocated at times. Now I wont sit here and enumerate the good and bad points of long weekends, that shall be the topic for the next post. [A cute lil gurrrlie I know, who likes reading my stuff and has a lot of ':'s and '-'s beside her name neednt be disappointed :) ]

Festivals are all about our culture, our tradition, our values. There definitely is all this prayer and pooja and all that going on. I quite like some part of it actually, the sights and sounds and even smells. Sweets... agarbatties, the songs, coconuts, camphor burning, the rangolies, diyas, mango leaves, haldi kumkum, flowers, new clothes...even the crackers which I dont mind so much..what with the mile-long ladis and bombs and huge rockets. Keith (a foreigner BTW), was the guy in our area this year who had the record for best and most enthusiastic cracker display :)

Seems like there is an abundance of new-found joy(and money too) in peoples lives , doesnt it? Only, joy isnt as infectious as flakiness(Phoebe ...my FRIENDS)

What if you dont feel like lighting all those things and everyone around you does? They call you all sorts of things weird, spoil sport and those kinda names.... Naaaah I'm not scared of all those bombs and all! Gimme a break.

What I like to doing best during the festival of lights is choose a vantage point at an optimum distance from the city/town you live in, at a little height(a small hill or the terrace maybe) and you would have a good night long son et lumiere. Really is a pretty sight. (Would come a close second only to the Aurora, no competition actually, that being a natural phenomena) Also you have little more clean air to breathe.

That said, sometimes I'm glad festivals are over. Why??? Because you are not really sure if you are genuinely-happy or forced-to-be-happy or you dont really care if you should be-seen-as-happy or pretending you are really happy? That IS a whole lot of pressure, you know. And by the time you have this figured out, you have another festival coming right up ...