With invectives hurled left right and center, as each cracker burst and unfailingly startled me, my vain attempts at focussing on writing out something that was part of an assignment for a soon to be launched portal seemed to just melt away into nothingness.
In conversation with Kodhi about someone real cute, I couldn’t help but notice that he too was going through the same plight in Chennai, being startled by the noise created by pesky kids in his apartment building, as he sang praises of the Kansa society ( for more details google for “Kansa society + Aadisht.net”, I am too lazy to fish out the link right now) and left-wing hippie though I am, apparently, I was also totally in agreement with his line of thinking.
He echoed the precise line of my thinking yesterday, as I was rudely awaken from my slumber in Bangalore on a day that I didn’t have to go to the office and could sleep in as late as possible. “Were we as bad as these monsters, about ten to twelve years ago?”
After finding out that firecrackers were made by child labourers in Sivakasi, TN, a decade ago, our household came to a unanimous decision of not lighting crackers. This decision was also aided by the fact that we were cheap guys, though in truth, we did revel substantially each year when a list of fire-crackers available was brought home, as my sister and I negotiated with our folks in order to get as much variety as possible, while ensuring that we stayed within our bounds and didn’t demand anything that was too obscenely flashy (aka super-bloody-expensive) and proceeded to then burst them during those stipulated festival days with gay abandon.
Blessed with a fertile imagination that had a destructive edge to it, experimentation with fireworks was the cool thing to do during Diwali. Stunts like placing a coconut shell over an ‘atom-bomb’ and watching it get blown to smithereens, or lighting the smaller crackers and throwing them upward to watch them explode in mid-air were things I did, along with friends of mine as we went about the ritualistic celebration of the victory of peer-pressure and market forces over hapless parents all over the country who were forced to literally see their hard-earned money go up in flames or explode with some ear-deafening noises.
Cut to the present day, where Diwali signifies three days of holidays, a long-weekend off work that I can spend lazily at home, typing out arbit shit on my livejournal, gorge on delicious food, and some substantially charged up enthusiasm to buy gifts for all at home and bitching about how people with fire-crackers make life miserable for the rest of us, among other things.
One theory that can reasonably brighten up those cynical among us is to view our adaptation towards explosions as a step towards how we can actually condition ourselves to lead a normal existence, should we ever be involved in a full-scale war with another nation, bullets raining all around us and explosives bursting with unnerving frequency. But “ah balls!” to that theory anyway. It is a stupid one.
This change, an almost 180 degree turn in our outlook towards Diwali in general and firecrackers in particular is a pretty scary one that, in all probability indicates the transition towards being an uncle, a prospect that looms like Damocles’ sword over the heads of each one of us men in their mid-twenties, and I am certain that most of us that fall in this category would be doing all they could to try and delay the inevitable.
But a quarter-life crisis, something one would see written about usually in a Bangalore Times supplement i fast turning away from being a myth to a pathetic reality. Another manner in which the media is actually manipulating our minds for its own viciously derived pleasure.
What has to happen will happen, and those that have to face it will do so regardless. Its not like turning 25 has been alien to most members of the human race that have crossed that milestone.
At the very end, to throw across an old but pertinent cliche – Spread light, not noise. Hope you all have a happy Diwali.
