A tale of two Diwalis

Song for the mood: Aaj Mausam Bada Beimaan Hain - Mohd. Rafi Saahab

Yesterday, November 9 was Diwali. Big festival. Yippee.

When I was in school, diwali used to be fun! I would get up bright and early, without mum or dad having to force me out of bed. That would be followed by morning puja (I just stood quietly for the sweets), new clothes and crackers! It was also on the day of diwali, me and my pals would bunch up and visit all the houses in the society to wish them all "Happy Diwali". The motive behind doing so was to get chocolates ... yes of course. Why else would we? You see, all the folks new that kids would be coming on this particular day, so most of them would be kind and considerate enough to greet the gang with a plate of chocolates. Yes, we never really thanked anyone for the chocolates afterwards. We were always too busy trying to grab as many chocolates from the plate as we could and stuff them in our pockets. Some folks were smart, they would hand us one chocolate, individually. Some were innovative - they got sweets instead of chocolates - which we hated - becozz the whole point of this strenuous wishing exercise was to collect enough chocolates to fill up a jar atleast! What were we going to do with, sweets! Some folks would get a whole plate of snacks and wonder why none of us would even touch it ... god! Couldn't they understand the difference between chocolates and snacks? I remember the one house we would all visit the last in line, coz the lady of the house would give us bananas. Not chocolates. Not sweets. Bananas. What was she expecting us to do? Jump in the air, scratch our armpits and ape our ancestors? Whew! Anyways, I always managed to gather atleast 45-50 pieces of candy by the end of it all. Needless to say, it would last only 5 days at the most after that ... :-P

Well, this year, I, for one had the most uneventful diwali possible.

I woke up at 10:00am. Had a fever the whole previous night, couldn't sleep a wink. Got up, went out for breakfast with Pranav. By the time we got back from breakfast it was almost 12:00pm. Hardly the time to have breakfast! By 1:30pm we again headed out, this time for lunch. We had to go out, since the college caterer was on leave ... and our food-committee didn't bother informing us ... so we had to go out. You can imagine what I am about to write ... yes, every restaurant, every joint was closed. Luckily for us one small joint was open where I ate some tomato-rice, with nariyal chatni. Trust me, not a good combo. We walked back to the college, then decided to go to the nearest bakery to purchase some biscuits - for the fear that joints might be closed again. There we realized that the food-joint atop the bakery, is open. So we had lunch again ... courtesy our very good friends, the 'mirandastics'. I came back to my hostel room at around 3:00pm ... and slept. I slept like a log! Must have been the lack of sleep in the past 2-3 days. Anyways, I got up around 7:00 or 7:30pm ... and then headed for dinner ... to the trusty food joint open on a diwali day. Back to room ... watched a movie ... 'Legend of Drunken Master' - Jackie Chan special. It was pretty good. And that was how diwali ended.

Maybe next year, diwali will be ... diwali. If not then I'll get something more to blog about ... either ways ... Happy Diwali!