Yesterday was Diwali, perhaps the biggest Hindu festival of the year, and certainly the most fire-cracker intensive. It sounded like a war zone in my neighborhood last night, and the air was thick was the smoke of burst crackers. The smoke crept through my balcony and entered my bedroom as well; viewed from the other side of the room, my curtains started to look distinctly hazy. And the fire-cracker bombardment continued.
But Diwali is really about the light, not the sound. As Hinduism experts Julia Roberts and Barack Obama have pointed out, Diwali is, at its core, a celebration of the victory of light over darkness. In that spirit, I’m posting a few pictures from Diwali 2009. I was staying at a yoga ashram at the time, and the pictures are from a fire show put on by students there.
