diwali tomorrow

Diwali tommorow...

gone are the days when i used to get up early in the morning to burst the first crackers of the day.....gone are the days when i used to help mom in cooking murukku and rava laddu.....gone are the days when i had to clean the house of the cobwebs.....gone are the days when i used to get lost in the market while shopping for clothes.....

life has changed so much.....from a kid who used to wet the pillow with his tears because its only a week for diwali and i havent got the crackers i had asked for ......and angry with his father for not buying him crackers....to the present day me who will sleep till 9 in the morning on the day of diwali.....

i particularly remember those years when fireworks were more important than anything else.....me and my sister used to start our ritualistic diwali day with a 1000 lar cracker....... then we will move to green coloured atom bombs which used to make a hell of a noise.....on a perfectly quite day one can probably hear the noise atleast 2 kms away.....then we will move to the lakshmi vedi....high decibel once again......this one used to leave a lot of paper behind.......then kuruvi vedi or pattasu......then to oosi pattasu also referrred to as bijili vedi...small crackers.....a pack of bijili may not cost more than 10 bucks and will have about 200 pieces...so a pack can keep u occupied for more than an hour......with my sis doing the thiri work that is..... u delay the detonation process by removing the paper cover from the tip of the thiri.....and i doing the honour of lighting it....we used to go on foe hours like this......this used to keep as occupied in the afternoon of the diwali.......then as the sun sets...one can see more colourful fireworks in the streets with ppl lighting flowerpots, sangu chakkram and rockets.....mom used to join us now to light the flowerpots.....dad was always apprehensive of danger when we were on the streets playing with flowerpots and sanguchakkaram......

I have heard horror stories of ppl losing their eyes because of a flowerpot explosion....

once i myself was involved in a little accident in the process of which i got a part of my left hand palm and left chest burnt......the way this happened was really funny......that was the year when i got promoted from a kid who can only light flowerpots and mathappu to a boy who can light lakshmi vedi.....it used to rain atleast a little dusring diwali....that diwali too it had rained and the ground was we....i trying to light a sanguchakkaram on the ground picked it up to check what was wrong with it.....drrrrr it went in my left hand burning my palm and the silky shirt i was wearing.....in the next hour i was in Dr Manjamutthu's clinic who was narrating me stories of how kids lost their eyes and how they should not play with crackers.....

this was more than enough for my father to ban any kind of fireworks in the house.....but the ban could not be imposed because the majority of the house was against it...bannin fireworks on the basis of an one off accident was purely illogical...

Now that iam a chemical engineer and have a particular liking to environmental engineering and a proponent of environmental friendly agricultural practices.....supporting fireworks on diwali is obviously against what im trying to preach nowadays...."environmental friendly lifestyle".....but the kid who liked to burst crackers wins the present day preacher....ofcourse we can avoid high decibel really environmental friendly crackers......