Vinay's blog hole on the net: Deepavali of 2009

Ah! The festival of those wonderful lights, bursting crackers, meeting people and the wonderful food during the 3 day extravaganza! None of the festivals in the Hindu calendar can beat this one, at least for me.

17th Oct, 2009, was the "Naraka-chaturdashi" day.

This year, Amma had to leave to Chennai for Abhi's Upanayanam ('Cross-Thread ceremony' for those who don't understand our rituals ;-) ). So her absence was definitely felt during the festivity all through.

So Soujanya, Pooja and myself along with Anna, got up early on the 17th for the "Enne Shastra". ("Enne" as in "Oil" not "Alchohol", you perverts ;-) ). For the first time though, Pooja did the Aarthi to all of us. Brand new clothes bought the previous day was waiting for us and we wore them all, looking bright and cheerful for the rest of the day.

Our in-laws had invited us over for lunch along with a whole bunch of fun loving family members including Souji's Chikamma, Chikappa, Kiran, Lavanya, Harish, Sanjana and Soujanya's eldest uncle from Hyderabad.

Delicious food after noon was followed by huge discussions on every single topic under the sun and kept us awake for the rest of the afternoon. All of us then migrated to our house in Hanumanthanagar for the simulated war-zone experience "Deepavali@Vinayadeep" session, which lived up to it's name for the rest of the evening. Every kid on the block was making sure that there was more cracker papers for the next day morning sweeper to clean.

Souji and Pooja decorated the house compound with neat looking "Deepa" (Diyas). Our home looked so beautiful with all of these lights. It was definitely a pretty sight.

Nisha, Deepu and Asha too joined us for bursting a whole lot of night crackers ranging from just ordinary to the ultimate fancy ones. From the hissing snake to the Swastik ground chakras to the whistling crackers to the North Indian imported "Anaar", one after another, the marathon session continued non-stop for 2 hours. Pooja loved the night crackers and wanted more! So did the young at heart.

The most hilarious one was a cracker which looked like a "Post card". It was marked - "To NaraGasura", "Address: Hell". Costing 50 bucks, this was such a hopeless let-off after realizing that it was a rip-off.

Overall, the day went pretty well and all of us had a great time together.

Here are a few photos and videos that we clicked during the event.