Its Deepavalli down South and Diwali up North….

Having grown up with a lot of Hindu friends, this festival is as close to my heart as Christmas.

The pre-adolescent days saw me shooting away the ‘capes’ in a gun a la Sean Connery, during Deepavali or bravely lighting a ‘Busvanom’(Flower Pot). Then came the teens, when I started toying with explosives from the real world ‘oossi vedi’ a firecracker in the 20 dB range... And since the teens extend a full 6 years, these were the years when I graduated from an Explosive to an Aerospace Expert… The Explosives increased in their dB’s and their cylindrical diameters, moving from ‘Kuruvi vedis’ to ‘Lakshmi vedis’ and finally ended in the 'A'– Bomb. The Buddha would have smiled but definitely not my mom who often woke up startled from her afternoon nap. Then came the mother of all experiments with firecrackers. These are days when we are sending rockets to the moon but we in those days tried something different like firing a ‘Rocket’ horizontally and getting the projectile all wrong and ended up in the drawing room of the newly moved in neighbour uncle who had a lovely looking daughter.

What’s Deepavalli without the mention of the 1000 walla, 5000 walla or the 10000 or more walla depending on one’s economic standing in the society? This was the Crème de la Crème of all fireworks. Thousands of high powered ‘oossi vedis’ in series were these wallas or more colloquially called the ‘saram’. The longer they lasted the richer you were.

It was a time when the economic might of a neighbourhood was measured by the decibels generated or the quantum of fireworks left over’s post Deepavalli.

Happy Deepavalli to all my friends who have Iyer, Iyengar, Krishnaswamy, Rao or Bhaskaran as their surnames and a Happy Diwali to all my friends who have a Sharma, Gupta or a Kulkarni as theirs surnames.