The Festival of Lights... Done Right (Sorry PTBO and Del Crary Park)

The holiday season is always the best time of the year. It is true in North America, just as it is true here. At home, around Christmas time, you can feel a general presence of positivity among people. The lights, the family time, the gifts and the wishing each other a “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Hanukkah” seems to make people more cheerful.

Well, this past week has been the Diwali season, and the same sort of positivity exists here as well. Diwali is the biggest and most celebrated Hindu festival of the year – equivalent to Christmas for Christians. It is deemed “the festival of lights”, as it is a part of the tradition for each family to hang lights from their homes, light a series of oil lamps outside their doors, and set off fireworks. Although the festival is of religious origin, it has become much more about spending time with family and friends. People host large parties for their friends and families at their homes, where they exchange traditional Diwali sweets and eat A LOT of food. These parties tend to be for all generations and often span into the wee ours of morning for all. Even the 70-year-old aunties are up until 5am fulfilling their duty of making sure everyone eats enough – for those of you who don’t have a great deal of exposure to Indian culture, think Italian grandmother.

Malik and I were fortunate enough to be invited to two Diwali parties. The first one was a Diwali card party. The party, hosted by one of our coworkers and her parents, had about 70 people of all different ages and was a really great time – I had 2nd and 3rd dinner. Awesome. The second one was on the actually night of Diwali at Krishna’s parent’s house and was a small get together of their immediate family (Krishna is the man we are living with). His family accepted us with warmth and love and really made us feel as though we were at home, celebrating with our family. It was a really nice taste of the family time you often miss while abroad.

Through the festivities, there were some traditions though that I couldn’t help but laugh at, mostly because they were a perfect reflection of Indian culture. So, as I mentioned above, the first party we went to was a card party. Playing cards is one of the most popular activities during Diwali, and it usually involves a little bit of gambling. I have played my fair share of cards in the past – countless lunch hours and spares at TAS spent playing euchre, cribbage at the cottage with my Grandpa, poker with my friends at hockey tournaments and Rummoli tournaments at the farm. However, Indian cards is truly an “Indian” experience. There are traditional games that they play, many of which the basic rules are similar to poker, so it wasn’t very hard to get the gist. However, like most things here, the games are chaotic. At home, when you get together to play cards, you play one game: poker, euchre etc for at least a while before deciding to switch. Here, every single time someone deals, you play a different game with different rules. And, for each game, each person seems to have their own set of rules. So, every hand, the first ten minutes is spent with a combination of explaining the rules to those who don’t know, and arguing over what the proper way to play those rules actually is. By the chance that you find a game that you like, and purpose to play it again when it’s your turn to deal, everyone complains that it’s already been played. To make another comparison, at home, if you’re playing cards, the game is the focus of what you are doing. So, if you chose to go refill your drink or run to the washroom, or answer a phone call, you really choose one of two options: have the dealer deal you out, or do so in between hands and be speedy. Not in India. Games stop and start randomly and people come in and out arbitrarily. Chaos. Yet, through all of this you can realize that its really not about the game; it’s about the time you spend with the people. That said, I did come away 500 rupees richer. BOOOOYAAAH

The second tradition is fireworks. Now, we have fireworks at home, so I thought I knew what that was all about. Canada Day, New Years and 4th of July all come with big firework celebrations. Usually people go to public parks to watch shows put on by municipalities or head to their cottages to set off their own in a place safely surrounded by water. What is the choice location here, you might ask? The streets. Children as young as five run into the middle of the roads to set off exploding crackers, which cars swerve to avoid. There are few, if any, public showings of fireworks. EVERYONE buys their own. So, in a country of 1.3 billion people, you can imagine how many fireworks are actually set off. The other main difference is in the nature of the fireworks themselves. At home, the emphasis is put on those that produce amazing colours and beautiful light patterns. Here: the loudest noise possible! The ‘best’ crackers here are the ones that resemble mini bombs. You light them off… run behind something… cover your ears… and wait for a blast so loud and powerful that you feel it in your chest and the car alarms of any vehicle within a 20-yard radius are left wailing.

Malik: “DID YOU SEE THAT?”
Graeme: “WHAAAAAT?”
Malik: “WHAAAT?”

Delhi is never a quiet place, nor is the air ever very clean, but the day after Diwali you enter the city feeling as though it had just hosted the biggest rock concert ever, trash littering the ground, ringing in your ears, incredibly happy people, and a cloud of smoke that you kind of hope is fog for your lungs’ sake.

Happy Diwali!!!! ………..WHAAT?

Scratch and Sniff Traveling

You walk through the crowds of people; your eyes are transfixed on the incredible amount of colours in such a crowded place. Looking mostly at your feet to be sure you know what you’re stepping on, in or around, you see the flashes of women’s sari’s as they pass you. Bright orange, blue, red, pink and green are swirled into a blur, as if God had a hunger for abstract art and used this city as his canvas to splatter with colour.

BEEEEEEEEEEEEEP! BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP! An orchestra of monotonous tones ensures that silence is never heard. Overwhelming are the traffic routes of whatever lies ahead, in front, behind and beside you, as auto-rickshaws, bicycle rickshaws, pedestrians, goats, cows, cars and stray dogs all move past you in conflicting directions – a real life game of Frogger, without the extra lives.

With each new step and each new moment trying to avoid being hit, comes a new smell. Your nose feels more confusion than anything else, trying desperately to determine if you are in a public bathroom or an aromatic kitchen. Hopeless it is in predicting whether the smoke cloud you are about to walk into will bring the wonderful smell of burning lavender incense, or the harsh stench of a burning petroleum product.

Sensory overload.

You are in Old Delhi, and somehow, it is one of the most beautiful experiences you have ever had.