Happy Diwali

Last Morning, my phone rang and I picked up saying a low tone “hello”. A voice replied “hello, Happy diwali” and I too responded with a genuinely not interested tone “Thanks, happy diwali to you too”. It was my friend and I hung up the call saying would call later. I checked the time, phone showed 09:00 am and I reluctantly got up thinking that yes, today was diwali, the day of enjoying, eating lots of sweets, cleaning, bursting crackers and we (I stay with roomies), should be soon engaged ourselves in cleaning process of our house. We friends started cleaning, somebody was at the kitchen and the other was at the rooms, one cleaning his bathroom, and the other cleaning the utensils. It took almost 1- 1.5 hr to complete the whole activity. And the waste that we all collected now needed to be dumped. Sid, one of my roomie, said “Arey just keep it outside the house, the garbage collector would come and collect it” not giving a damn that the same floor was being shared by 2 more flats. Our apartment builder has built a dump zone for all the garbage at each floor and I was of the view that we could dump the garbage collected there itself. Thanks, don’t know to whom, he didn’t do that and put it in the dump zone. I said to myself “happy diwali”.
It is one day when most of the people want to make Laxmi, the goddess of money, happy and the bachelors don’t remain behind in doing that fully fledged. Yes, again we all started decorating Pooja sthan with diyas and Chinese manufactured lights. Suddenly my phone rang again, and this time it was my father, said “happy diwali son” and I replied, this time cherishingly, “happy diwali” and he told me to make a note of not eating sweets made up of Mewa. Sad, one of my so called definitions of diwali (eating sweets) was ruined and the reason given that the pure Mewa was not being used in the sweets. I said “ok” and a short thanks (reluctantly) for not letting me eat impure sweet.
An evening came and I went out to meet some of my friends. Outside the apartment, a group of 10-15 people, young people were trying to enjoy Diwali. They were standing there just outside the apartment gate, shouting, not letting the vehicles easy way in or out both, passing vulgar remarks garishly ( in quest for enjoying) among themselves only. They didn’t care for any other person in the name of enjoyment of the festival. I saw them and again my other definition gone in vain.
As I entered my friend’s house, lots of friends were already there as I was the last one to come (as usual but I always try to manage) and we all greeted each other. After some talks we decided to go down to burst crackers. Although I have stopped bursting crackers since a long time, I went down with them (else I had to sit aloneL). They started bursting them, everybody was enjoying, some were startled by its lights, and some were putting fingers in their ears to resist the sound of crackers and some like me watching everybody. I also joined them in lighting fooljhadi and firkiri. But then, I was looking at the noise, the fog of pollution created by the crackers, and the wastage of money and thinking that is it a real diwali. And then, thereafter accruing to my thoughts of mind, garbage created over was left there only, and nobody took, even the empty boxes, to the dump zone. Is it really a Diwali we were celebrating, by polluting both the environment and the eatables, by wasting money, by shouting vulgarly?
But then if everybody was busy doing all this, they all could not be wrong!! We went inside the house and then I kept all thoughts in some lonely part of my brain when we had homemade food and my mind said to me “All’s well that ends well”.