Diwali is one of those gazette days for people to display their DQ - yaniki Desi Quotient. Sari selfies are posted. Alarmingly good rangoli items are presented. Sugar free delicacies setting healthily, temptingly in gleaming thalis are photographed
Representative pic
Diwali is one of those gazette days for people to display their DQ — yaniki Desi Quotient. Sari selfies are posted. Alarmingly good rangoli items are presented. Sugar free delicacies setting healthily, temptingly in gleaming thalis are photographed.
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If you learn well from social media (I do), you will learn the names of several types of jewellery you have always coveted but never acquired, partly because you didn't clean your house enough for Ms Lakshmi to visit, and partly because you have been calling said jewels — the hand thing, forehead thing, ear type thing and waist thingy (heretofore known as haath-phool, maang-tika, karna-phool and kardhani, respectively).
I beheld many of these delights on my phone while waiting to pay for kaju katli and kala jamuns at Gulati Sweets (Best in the East). An acquaintance of mine scoffed. Oh, most of these would not be caught dead being desi on non-designated days, where they would aspire to the usual Western consumer culture. What do they know about tradition! Maybe. But who does, we might ask, skipping as we do from self to self, day to day.
As I unlock my door, my neighbour emerges from the lift and remarks at my mithai boxes, oh readymade sweets? Cleary my DQ grade is D for Desultory.
It's not that I haven't made some feeble attempts at assembling some desitude. I did purchase a rather fancy sari rationalising that I would wear it for Diwali. Due to my lack of — something — I failed to acquire a blouse for it, so, no sari selfie I guess. I did Instagram a picture of a cartful of diyas the other day. A comment popped up right away: industrial made diyas, not handmade. Sigh.
Is it possible to win in the authenticity stakes? Nope. Mostly because lecturebaazi about authenticity and purity are like loud crackers, flattening our hearing, obscuring our vision with their smoke, polarising things falsely. If Diwali is about overcoming hate and anger and choosing love then let's dispense with the purist type idea of tradition and choose the functional type this year and just, you know, check out each other's sweets.
Because, that's what we do everyday anyway, no? Today I made a bangda curry from a recipe my Konkani friend posted on his Facebook page. My Syrian Christian friend called me for some Northie type recipes as she is having a Diwali party for 20 people but I convinced her to avoid chhole, and instead just copy pasted my mother's Gchat transmitted recipe for Khoja haray masale ka gosht with masoor dal khichdi, into an email for her. Apparently, her mum is lobbying for Hyderabadi bagharay baingan ("it is a glamorous recipe" she has petitioned).
If Diwali is about wealth, then let's not make ourselves poor by imaging fixed traditions and Indiannesses. Let's take home the whole kitty of traditions that we borrow and taste and lend each other every day. Maybe, I will borrow my clever friend's idea of wearing a sari with a crop top, file it under contemporary tradition and post that sari selfie after all. So may the kaju katli be sweet, sugar-free or sugar-steeped, readymade or handmade, yours or your friend's. Forget lecturebaazi, you just have whichever type of sweetly traditional Happy Diwali.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevipictures.com
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