A Diwali Message...

Diwali festival is here, bringing with it love and to rebuilt the relationship between family and friends. Each one of us will sit with our family and pray to Goddess Laxmi to bless us spiritually and mentally. We will pray for success and prosperity and ask for strength to face the rough times.

But God helps those who help themselves. Just praying won’t help, there has to be some effort on our behalf too.

To bring the happiness into our lives, we should hold ourselves accountable; it’s no use blaming others for our unhappiness. Nobody can harm us if we do not allow them. We are in charge of our own feelings and as we think so shall we feel.

We create the thought and that creates feelings.

Positive or negative thought, it’s all in our control. We spend too much time thinking about what people will gossip about us. In this tech world that we live, let it be understood that people really have no time to think or talk about us. Even if they make a comment, it’s just a passing phrase, nothing to brood about. They make a comment and get on with it, might even forget about it.

But what do we do?

We sit and think about it for hours and hours, making ourselves miserable. “How dare she say this about me? How much does she know me? As if she is perfect!” we repeat over and over, unwilling to forget, thus bringing unhappiness into our lives.

The first germ of bad feeling is our bad thought. We want revenge.

We won’t rest till we have got even and said equally unkind things back to them. We have attachment with negativity and we are always being cynical about every issue. This is a germ that spreads like virus and envelops all the people around us creating negative vibrations that may result in headache, health problems or discomfort.

People are so insecure that they are always doing weird thing to draw attention to themselves.

Why don’t we have a faith in ourselves? Why must we keep proving ourselves?

It is not important to make an impression on everyone whom we meet. As long as we have good opinion about our own selves and have enough faith in our own abilities, there is no need to prove it. Our talent will be recognized eventually without any struggle.

On this day, of Diwali festival, may we be blessed and let us work on cleansing our souls so that negative vibrations don’t even knock on our doors.

Happy Diwali and a happy New year!!

Celebration

This post has been published by me as a part of the Blog-a-Ton 16; the sixteenth edition of the online marathon of Bloggers; where we decide and we write. To be part of the next edition, visit and start following Blog-a-Ton.

One more Diwali this year.

I think, the craze diminishes with age, especially if you don’t have children to enjoy with, it is not like those Diwali days of yester years when we were kids.

This year it wore a subdued mood.

Best Diwali was celebrated during those days when mom was alive. It had a different meaning then. Mom would start cleaning the house fifteen days before the D-day, which would be followed by shopping for new clothes, then making sweets, distributing to family and friends and finally the prayers, with plenty of gifts exchanged, some of them recycled. There would be lots of crackers and fireworks, mud lamps were placed at every window sill in the house and balconies would be lit with colorful bulbs. We would have continuous stream of guests, and of course lots of phone calls from relatives who lived abroad.

But, after mom, nothing is same.

With 90% of my older relatives dead and gone, the few that are left, they live in their own world.

Cleaning is done by maids, sweets and savories purchased from the stores and shopping is just a norm. We are shopping all year round so this is just another day.

I walk downstairs to meet the kids in my building compound and they are bursting expensive rockets. ‘How much did you pay for this 30 seconds pleasure?” I ask their father as I see the rocket go up in the sky and burst into thousand spraklers "Don’t even mention, it burns our heart and our pocket” they say “We have paid through our nose” and their kids looked at them with crinkled nose trying to understand what we meant and I tell them “Beta, you don’t understand how difficult the times are now, wait for 20 years and you will understand”

The children continue to derive the pleasure of bursting more crackers, those bigger strings of 2000 noisy crackers and I pause for a longer time to complete my unfinished sentence.

I am proud of the blinking red-rose shaped bulbs, which runs parallel to string of colored bigger bulbs and then there is one more string of hundred tiny green bulbs running across my balcony grill in the zigzag fashion. I am elated each time I go to my balcony to admire them, and then suddenly...Oh No! It is raining heavily, wetting my extension cord. It never used to rain during Diwali . Global warming! Bah! It is darkness again.

I recieve many SMS's, people sending me the forwards with no originality or personal touch. I do the same. All my friends are on social media and they all wish me on Face-book. No postman arrives with a greeting card. (when they come for Diwali bakshis they have an embarrassed look) All of my NRI family is on a smart phone and they exchange virtual sweets, jokes and greetings, but nobody calls to wish…no warm voice I hear. Every body’ messages I read on line and smile…alone.

I am glad that I do have family and friends towards whom I can stretch and reach physically.

I eat, pray and love during Diwali for sometime with them, offline

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Diwali is just round the corner

To enjoy the true essence of Diwali festival, one should be in India. Last year I was in Spain, and I tried to create the atmosphere of the festival so that my brother’s kids, who have never visited India during this time, could experience this festival. I made rangoli, prepared sweets at home, performed Laxmi pooja at our shop and then went to a Chinese restaurant for dinner, but that was all that we could do. No fire crackers, no lighting of Diyas in the house, no meeting people and no wishing every second person ‘Happy Diwali’ Ah nothing….. But this year, I hope, it is going to be different; I hope it to be the way I like it. The kids in my building are quite excited. I see them every evening with a big basket of fire crackers, having competitions of being the loudest joker. They pretend they are brave but take full five minutes to burst a tiny cracker, cowards! The only brave thing they can do is to burn fooljari. (sparklers). During my growing up days, there was great variety of firecrackers available in the market, like those triangular and circular fountains that sprinkled sparklers in the air, then there was a whistle that would go whizzing up in the air, sometimes in wrong direction chasing a frightened person. Then there were rockets, which we would keep in sleeping position at the end of the lane and see it flying parallel to the ground. We had snakes emerging from a small black tablet, there were chaklis that would go round and round, throwing sparklers in all directions. I don’t see these kids with such simple firecrackers any more, (I am sure they must be available but these kids don’t seem to like it) they just like those loud bombs, which me thinks, gives them thrills, you see them blinking their eyes, covering their ears and waiting for it to explode and then jumping and laughing, like tiny terrorists. I don’t even see any adults with these kids, except the watchman or a maid. Parents, aunts, uncles and relatives are too busy with their own lives to bother accompanying their kids. The streets are decorated with lights and lanterns, retail shops are eagerly waiting for shoppers, but everything is so damn expensive that sitting at home and networking seems like a better option.